Bug#786780: Metastudent and its data (Was: Bug#786780: metastudent has circular Depends on metastudent-data)

2015-07-06 Thread Andreas Tille
Hi Tobias,

at first thanks for maintaining metastudent in the Debian Med team.  I
guess you did not yet realised this bug report since there is no
response in the bug log.  Please note that bugs in the Debian BTS are
sent only to the Maintainer (in this case our mailing list).  If you
consider the mailing list as to high volume it would be good if you
would subscribe the packages you maintain in the Package Tracking
System[1].  This would enable you to get all relevant information about
a restricted set of packages via e-mail.

To work on the said problem I started looking into the metastudent
package first (please svn up).  Besides some minor lintian issues
I mainly changed two things:

  1. Copy of /usr/share/metastudent/metastudentrc.default in
 /etc/metastudentrc
 If the manpage is correct this overrides the configuration
 above.  Configuration files in Debian should always go to
 etc - so this is fullfilled.
  2. change metastudent-data from Depends to Recommends

The rationale of the second change is that if a user has some other
database (be it local or whatever) the config file could be adapted and
metastudent could be run sensibly without the metastudent-data package.
At least this is my naive view on this - please correct me if I'm wrong
since I'm no metastudent user.

So far for metastudnet however, this change is not yet the final
solution for the said bug.  I agree with the bug reporter that the data
package does not really depends from metastudent binary and the relation
is at best a Recommends if not only Suggests or Enhances.

Besides this I wonder about the role of the metastudent-data-2 package.
Is it correct that metastudent does not necessarily need
metastudent-data but also could run sensibly with just
metastudent-data-2?  If the latter would be the case I suggest the
following:

   1. find a better name for metastudent-data (perhaps
  metastudent-dataset-201401)
   2. Add
 Provides: metastudent-data
  to its control file
   3. Use
 Recommends: metastudent-dataset-201401 | metastudent-data
   4. May be also metastudent-data-2 should be named
  metastudent-dataset-201012 to follow the logic above
  and also get the
 Provides: metastudent-data

This would reflect my assumption about the role of the (currently) two
data sets.  If you confirm that metastudent can run with any of these
data sets I'd recommend implementing this (and I also volunteer to
implement it if something might be unclear at your side.)

Kind regards

  Andreas.

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 04:19:21PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
 Package: metastudent
 Version: 2.0.1-1
 Severity: important
 
 Hello Debian Med Packaging Team,
 
 There is a circular dependency between metastudent and metastudent-data:
 
 metastudent   :Depends: metastudent-data (= 2.0.0)
 metastudent-data  :Depends: metastudent (= 2.0.0)
 
 Circular dependencies are known to cause problems during upgrade,
 so we should try to get rid of them.
 
 Since metastudent is a data package, it is quite likely it does not need
 actually to depend on metastudent-data and removing this dependency would
 remove the circular dependency, so I would suggest you do so.
 
 See threads 
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg02111.html
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/11/msg01101.html
 
 Cheers,
 -- 
 Bill. ballo...@debian.org

[1] https://packages.qa.debian.org/

-- 
http://fam-tille.de


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Bug#786780: Metastudent and its data (Was: Bug#786780: metastudent has circular Depends on metastudent-data)

2015-07-06 Thread Laszlo Kajan
Hello Andreas!

On 06/07/15 13:40, Andreas Tille wrote:
 at first thanks for maintaining metastudent in the Debian Med team.  I
 guess you did not yet realised this bug report since there is no
 response in the bug log.  Please note that bugs in the Debian BTS are

I think this was fixed in metastudent-data by changing the Depends on 
metastudent (= 2.0.0) to 'Breaks: metastudent ( 2.0.0)'.
Tobias forgot to close the bug in the changelog, and apparently forgot to email 
the bug tracker as well.
@Tobi: do you remember those commands and links I sent you about this?

I will let Tobias explain the rest. In short, I think that dependency is a hard 
'Depends' on the data package, and not a 'Recommends', because
it is very unlikely that anyone but upstream would be able to generate that 
data package (@Tobi: correct me if I am wrong), and the software
will be useless without it. The reason for breaking metastudent up to 
metastudent(-data\d)? is technical: to allow uploads of a small, but more
frequently-changing non-data package, avoiding the need to upload versions of a 
large data package.

Best regards,
Laszlo



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Bug#786780: metastudent has circular Depends on metastudent-data

2015-05-25 Thread Bill Allombert
Package: metastudent
Version: 2.0.1-1
Severity: important

Hello Debian Med Packaging Team,

There is a circular dependency between metastudent and metastudent-data:

metastudent :Depends: metastudent-data (= 2.0.0)
metastudent-data:Depends: metastudent (= 2.0.0)

Circular dependencies are known to cause problems during upgrade,
so we should try to get rid of them.

Since metastudent is a data package, it is quite likely it does not need
actually to depend on metastudent-data and removing this dependency would
remove the circular dependency, so I would suggest you do so.

See threads 
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg02111.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/11/msg01101.html

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. ballo...@debian.org

Imagine a large red swirl here. 


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