[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#665326: confused by disapparance of octave-depends (nothing in changelog)

Thomas Weber tweber at debian.org
Fri Mar 30 22:09:15 UTC 2012


On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 12:51:36PM +0200, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> We abandoned versioned package names, but an octave-depends script could
> still be useful nowadays to get:
> 
>     Depends: ${octave:Depends}
>     
> replaced by:
> 
>     Depends: octave (>= 3.6.1)
> 
> so that the version of Octave in the relationship will match the one used
> when the package was built.  

Yes, and I actually consider this a bug. Why should a package depend on
3.6.2, just because 3.6.2 happened to be installed instead of 3.6.1?
If the binary ABI changes, the soname changes and that's picked up by
the library dependency. Apart from that, maintainers have free reign in
how they treat us as a dependency.

> There are some packages in Debian that use octave-depends, like xmds
> and libgdf, and it would be a courtesy of ours to not break their
> debian/rules.

Those package will have to change now once and for all, and from that
point on they can handle octave like any library dependency. No special
variables, no special scripts, ...

Is there a real reason why libgdf depends on >= 3.2.4. Wouldn't 3.2.3
suffice?  Because if 3.2.3 sufficed, we have made transitions far more
difficult.  Just imagine the release team doing a binNMU for a library
transition and suddenly the package cannot migrate because it now
depends on a newer version of Octave.

> What you think about reintroducing the octave-depends script?

I actively dislike it. I want octave to be as close to a normal library
as possible in dependency handling, without anything special.

	Thomas



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