Dear Fink developers,
In the course of working to update several of fink's "essential" packages, some of us have come to realize that we need a policy change: we need packages to explicitly declare their dependencies on essential packages.
The contrary policy -- that packages should *not* declare dependencies on essential packages -- has been part of the lore of Fink for some time, although I do not believe it is written down anywhere. I plan to add the new policy to the packaging manual if there are no objections to it.
The packages of immediate concern are the essential shared libraries, contained in the apt-shlibs, bzip2-shlibs, gettext, libiconv and ncurses-shlibs packages. We will be upgrading two of these packages soon, and would eventually like to deprecate gettext and ncurses-shlibs in favor of gettext3-shlibs and libncurses5-shlibs, respectively. We can't do that deprecation unless folks declare their dependencies on the existing libraries.
Note that stating a new dependency like this, even a dependency on an essential package, makes a change in the .deb and requires the revision number of the package to me increased.
Comments and discussion are welcome.
-- Dave
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