reassign 307833 tech-ctte reassign 311329 tech-ctte reassign 323970 tech-ctte reassign 324153 tech-ctte reassign 325102 tech-ctte thanks
Hello,
On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 15:00:05 +0100, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
> If I do not hear from you in two weeks, I will assume that you are not
> changing your opinion. In that case, I will be investigating other
> measures of resolving this, since I believe it needs to have a
> resolution that can satisfy the posters to this bug.
I have not heard from the maintainer in over four weeks, so I'll have to
assume he sticks to his statement "Discussion is closed!". Therefore I'm
now reassigning this bug to the technical committee in the hope that it
gets resolved.
Summarizing the problem:
- apt-file's default configuration uses curl;
- apt-file does not depend on curl, but recommends it;
- installing apt-file and running it when curl is not installed yields
errors ("sh: curl: command not found").
Several people have reported this as a bug, stating that the program
should work out of the box, by depending on the downloader that it
needs.
The response of the maintainer is documented in the package's README:
> Please note that curl is need with _THIS_ configuration file only
> If you prefer using wget, it's up to you but you _MUST_ change the
> chanfinguration file according to your choice.
> This explains why nor wget nor curl are in the package dependances but
> on recommends.
This reasoning is disputed by the bugreporters (see buglogs) so in my
opinion, a decision on the matter is in order.
Here are the solutions to the matter that I think would be possible:
1) Depend on all supported downloaders (by using the "|" operator): curl
| wget for example. Change apt-file to automatically use the
downloader that's available on a user's system. The user can always
override that in the configuration file. Mike O'Connor provided a
patch for this.
2) Make the default configuration work with just one downloader (like
now), but in that case apt-file really must depend on that
downloader. This can be curl, but one could also opt for wget since
more systems will already have that available.
3) Ask the user by debconf which downloader to use.
If you ask me, 3 is unnecessarily complex. 2 is the most simple and the
most inflexible. I don't see that as a problem though, since the
downloading is a very straightforward operation. The first has a good
balance between the choice of downloader and no required configuration,
and there's a patch for that issue.
I hope the technical committee can assist in resolving this bug, and I
thank them in advance for their time.
regards,
Thijs Kinkhorst
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