[Please follow-up to debian-mentors, cc-ing me and Steve.] Hi Steve,
Steve Langasek wrote: > On Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 11:57:28PM -0600, Jonathan Nieder wrote: >> I just realized that xz-utils and liblzma2 technically aren’t ready to >> be pseudo-essential: they use Depends: instead of Pre-Depends: for >> their dependencies. > > This doesn't follow. Only the essential packages themselves must be usable > when not configured, which is why those packages use pre-dependencies, not > dependencies. The packages which are *themselves* pre-dependencies don't > need to have their dependencies promoted to pre-dependencies. When dpkg is upgraded, the pre-dependency of dpkg on xz-utils would ensure that xz-utils is configured before the updated dpkg is unpacked. Such an upgrade is safe without any changes to xz-utils. If xz-utils is upgraded after that, however, IIUC the upgraded xz-utils might be unpacked before its dependencies. The essential functionality (support for unpacking lzma-compressed .debs) provided by xz-utils would then be missing during the interval between the unpacking time of the new xz-utils and a liblzma2 with new symbols it uses, say. I thought that this was why various other pseudo-essential packages (gawk/mawk/original-awk, liblocale-gettext-perl, libpam-modules) used pre-depends. What am I missing? >> lzma has had the same problem for the last year, so I guess it’s not a >> big deal in practice. I’ll prepare an upload fixing xz-utils tomorrow >> morning. > > That's not a fix, and not appropriate to upload without consulting > debian-devel. Good point; I will hold off. I had assumed it was implicit when discussing a package becoming pseudo-essential that this means adding pre-depends, but clearly I was wrong. If my analysis above is correct, which is a big if, the missing Pre-Depends would not be an issue until the dependencies of xz-utils or liblzma change (and conversely, would be an issue then). There is plenty of time to figure this out before then. Thanks for your help, Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100308114613.ga6...@progeny.tock