Hi Andreas, I my feeling right that you basically propose the same as I?
Andreas Tille <[email protected]> writes: > I'm all for it. I just did `sed -i 's/^Depends/Recommends/' tasks/*` in > Debian Med packages but while I assumed that this would work with > blends-dev unfortunately it does not. I need to check this later since > I'm busy with other stuff. I think the web sentinel threats Depends and > Recommends equally so the replacement should not harm. So, we should do a 0th step and fix blends-dev to accept Recommends: as well (and translates it to Recommends: at package dependency level) >> and then change the behaviour of the "blends-dev" package. > > I think the first change in blends-dev should be to accept Recommends. Ack. Should be trivial to fix. > I admit for the sake of simplicity (and the fact that we have only a > few Blends we could deal with easily) we could simply fix blends-dev > to accept Recommends. Ack. This is the first step and seems not nontroversial at all. > After this we could inform those few Blends maintainers (I'll be > responsible for med, science and junior) Ack. The usual way to "inform other blends" (which means: ask them to change something in their blends packages) is a bug report, which would also help us to track the progress. > I guess Debian GIS and Debian Games are also happy about the change, > no idea about Debian Multimedia and how/whether it is maintained at > all, Debian Accessibilities only uses web sentinel (no metapackages - > I would do the change here as well) and finally EzGo which is kind of > a riddle to me. Non maintained blends cout get an NMU, and also then the bug report helps documenting the process. > In a second round we could later change the behaviour of Depends. Ack. And to make sure that no older blends metapackage slips through (maybe local, or in a derivative), we should mark the new format somehow -- which brings the "Format:" header line into the game. Any old-style blends metapackage would then fail to build (and could again easily be fixed). > I agree that technically that's a weak solution but should work if > somebody intends to reproduce older packages since we would fail to > reproduce older packages from older Git commits. However, I do not > consider this a strong argument over burning developer time with > implementing and testing a more complex versioning + format system. I do not see a use case for this. Even when backported, one could still generate the source package on a current system. And if we provide a simple (sed) script that does s/^Depends:/Recommends:/ (and adds the format line in the begining), one could manually apply this before further processing with blends-dev. Best regards Ole
