Bug#863295: grr: Please remove dependency on prelink

[Geoffrey Thomas]

Package: grr-server
Version: 3.1.0.2+dfsg-2
Severity: wishlist

Hi!

I'm the current maintainer of prelink in Debian. The tool is pretty 
unloved upstream -- Fedora, where I get sources from, has removed it 
entirely in Fedora 23, and the latest release tarball isn't even in the 
usual place -- so there's a decent chance that prelink will leave Debian 
at some point in the next release cycle.

It looks like grr only uses prelink to un-prelink things, and that entire 
code is conditional on whether /usr/sbin/prelink exists. If I'm reading 
this right, that means there's no need to install prelink on the machines 
of people who install grr -- no binaries on their machines will be 
prelinked, so there's no need to un-prelink anything. So prelink doesn't 
need to be a dependency: grr will do the right thing if it's installed, 
but will skip over that code if it's not.

If that's correct, can you remove prelink from your Depends: line 
(whenever you next do an upload, no urgency)? That will avoid more people 
having prelink installed than necessary, and make it easier to remove 
prelink from Debian in the future.

Thanks,
-- 
Geoffrey Thomas
https://ldpreload.com
geofft at ldpreload.com