Hi, On Mon, 07 Mar 2011, Anders Kaseorg wrote: > > So in this case the pre-dependency should *not* be set, as it only > > serves to complicate the upgrade path. > > If this becomes the consensus of debian-devel, there are two things that > should probably be changed: > > • The section of the dpkg-maintscript-helper(1) about the Pre-Depends > being “unconditionally required” should be clarified.
You're misparsing the documentation. It says "using [dpkg-maintscript-helper] unconditionally requires a pre-dependency" but then it advise you to avoid the Pre-Depends by protecting the call with a test: if dpkg-maintscript-helper supports <command>; then dpkg-maintscript-helper <command> ... fi > • In Debhelper, dh_installdeb shouldn’t add this Pre-Depends automatically > via ${misc:Pre-Depends} (see #574443). I think it's fine for debhelper to do it automatically but maybe it could offer an option to switch to the protected variant and not set the Pre-Depends. I don't really think that the Pre-Depends on dpkg are problematic. We must just ensure that we don't get any Pre-Depends loop with dpkg's (pre|)dependencies. Of course, the pre-depends become mostly irrelevant when the version in oldstable supports it but that's not the case yet. And it's not unusual for people to try an upgrade that skips a release... even if we don't officially support it, it's not a reason to break them when there's no really need to. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Follow my Debian News ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.com (English) ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110307071609.gf14...@rivendell.home.ouaza.com