On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 08:51:36AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Hurm. I have to admit that this doesn't make me particularly happy, since > checking source packages seems like a fundamental action of Lintian. The > use of dpkg-dev in Lintian seems to meet the Policy definition of at > *least* Recommends fairly clearly, and Suggests feels much too weak when > we lose that basic of functionality. > > On the other hand, I have no alternative solution to your particular > problem; the Recommends list of dpkg-dev is indeed rather heavy, since it > includes build-essential.
Hmm. I kicked this around with some of my team. Here are a few alternatives, all a bit grotty in one way or another: * Split lintian into two binary packages, one of which only supports checking binary packages, and the other of which (still called 'lintian') supports everything and depends on the first. * Reimplement the small number of checks we consider for this use case in aptdaemon or somewhere else. * Split out dpkg-source from dpkg-dev. * Observe that we already document how to unpack source packages without dpkg-dev for users of non-Debian systems (in /usr/share/doc/debian/source-unpack.txt - it currently only documents format 1.0, but I attached a patch to #579263 some time ago that updates this to 3.0), and that therefore this is an interface that it's not necessarily too dreadful to reimplement as long as it's strictly as a fallback for the case where dpkg-source is not present. Perhaps oddly, I think the last of those actually strikes me as the least bad solution, although only because the method is already documented (modulo that bug report). -- Colin Watson [[email protected]] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
