>>>>> Sébastien Villemot <sebast...@debian.org> writes:
>>>>> Le mardi 13 novembre 2018 à 10:50 +0000, Barak A. Pearlmutter a écrit :
>> Package: octave-doc: Version: 4.4.1-2
>> The octave-doc “Depends: info” have an ”| info-browser”, which is
>> provided by info but also by GNU Emacs.
> The “info-browser” alternative has been dropped on purpose. See
> #543914 for the background.
To quote:
TW> Switching to infobrowser is not possible. Octave uses some
TW> switches specific to info (and maybe other info browsers):
TW> octave:1> info_program("/usr/bin/pinfo")
TW> octave:2> doc root
TW> Przemek's Info Viewer v0.6.9
TW> /usr/bin/pinfo: unrecognized option '--directory'
TW> /usr/bin/pinfo: unrecognized option '--index-search'
I’d like to point out that GNU Emacs comes with an ‘inferior-octave’
mode, and it’s entirely reasonable that those who do use it will
also rely on Emacs’ own M-x info reader in place of the Octave’s
own ‘doc’ command – which I believe will not work when called from
within inferior-octave anyway.
However, given that an arbitrary ‘info-browser’ can not, in fact,
be substituted for ‘info’ proper, I suggest that the dependency
on ‘info’ is downgraded to Recommends:, as opposed to a
“non-working” alternative being added to it. (“The Recommends
field should list packages that would be found together with
this one in all but unusual installations.” — Policy 7.2.)
That parts of the package (or, as in this case, – a different,
even if related, package) break when a Recommends: dependency is
not installed is, to the best of my knowledge, deemed permissible;
see the TC ruling in Bug#119517, for instance; to quote:
IJ> 1. It is generally bad for programs to fail due to run-time
IJ> linkage failures, in most cases. There may however be other
IJ> tradeoffs involved that make this a reasonable choice.
IJ> 2. In this particular case, splitting the package introduces a
IJ> level of administration and other overhead which outweighs the
IJ> minor ugliness of the run-time linker error message.
Also, ‘info-browser’ should probably be mentioned in Suggests: –
as an alternative to www-browser and pdf-viewer.
TYC.
--
FSF associate member #7257 np. Wonderland — Tren
