Holger Levsen:
hi Sean,
thanks for the bug report!
Looping in the debhelper maintainer(s) as I have a question & thus
leaving the full context...:
On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 10:36:23AM +0100, Sean Whitton wrote:
Package: developers-reference
Version: 14.16
Severity: important
The move of libjs-jquery, libjs-sphinxdoc and sphinx-rtd-theme-common
from Recommends to Depends has broken installation of this package on
stable.
(this happended when switching to debhelper-compat 14 in the last upload..._)
Policy and dev-ref deliberately kept these in Recommends in order to
support this use case. Indeed, my configuration management scripts for
my own machines are now failing :)
i'm not sure if this possible with compat=14 or whether I should revert
to what we did with dev-ref 14.15 using compat=13 ?
Hi,
This is a likely a consequence of relationship substvars. Which ever
tool adds those dependencies (I do not know which it is, but likely
`sphinxdoc` since it is the only add-on sequence I noticed in devref)
will need to evaluate how to handle the case where these should not be
hard dependencies.
The discussion I had with Hefee in #1133692 might be interesting as
context here for the maintainer of the tool in question. It was another
case where a helper needed to tweak its behaviour in response to the
relationship substvar support in debhelper.
From a devref maintainer PoV, you have to downgrade to compat 13 while
it is resolved (depending on how important this feature is). You can
also take the "substvar" rewrite solution from
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/03/msg00030.html. I do not
recommend it, but it is an option.
Best regards,
Niels
