On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 06:20:46PM -0000, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Do you have a preferred way to break the cycle? My preference would be
> to weaken the strict libfontconfig1 -> fontconfig-config dependency. The
> latter just contains configuration files, which are not related to the
> library ABI at all. In case fontconfig-config introduces a new option
> which only  a newer library can handle the dependency needs to be
> bumped, but that's the case only very seldomly.

I would not like us to change this fontconfig package dependency without
discussing with the Debian maintainer.  I don't see a clear reason for it to
be a strict versioned dependency, but it's at least possible that we'll be
breaking a maintainer assumption about how the package dependencies work
that would bite us in a future merge.

> The other option would be to introduce manual changes to many dozen
> packages which currently use cdbs and ship SVG files, or to revert the
> image comparison which checks for correctness.

I think it's a departure from upstream handling of cdbs to have the package
now depend on such a huge library dependency tree.  For other features, cdbs
provides integration but requires the consuming package to activate this
feature by adding the necessary build-dependency and rules include.  It may
be late to fix this for natty, but I think it's important that we preserve
this feature of cdbs in the future, since cdbs is used by many packages that
are not part of the desktop stack.

(As an aside, I'm quite unhappy that cdbs continues to be used as a
catch-all for desktop-wide packaging changes.  cdbs's architecture is buggy
by design, and the continuing drift from stock debhelper behavior, and from
upstream cdbs behavior, makes it all the harder to get rid of cdbs in favor
of dh.)

Do the affected packages have any common build-dependency, such as
gnome-pkg-tools, to which the python-scour dependency could be safely added
instead of adding it directly to cdbs?  Is there any hope of implementing
dh_scour *without* pulling in this deep dependency tree?

Thanks,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
[email protected]                                     [email protected]

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/734471

Title:
  cdbs python-scour dependency makes fontconfig unbuildable

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