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  • Re: RFC: packages that can be installed by the user but not used as bui

    From Samuel Thibault@21:1/5 to All on Tue Aug 20 01:30:01 2024
    Hello,

    Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer, le lun. 19 août 2024 20:17:08 -0300, a ecrit:
    But users would love to have something like 'qt6-full-dev'. And the
    reason we never provided them with this meta-package is that package maintainers would use it almost everywhere, dragging the whole Qt installation on each package depending on it... This is a _huge_ waste
    of resources and buildd time (or is it not??)

    It is, but also on maintainer systems when testing in bare chroots etc.
    So I don't think maintainers would use it that much in practice.
    (similarly to no package currently build-depending on texlive-full)

    Samuel

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  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to perezmeyer@gmail.com on Tue Aug 20 02:00:01 2024
    Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer <perezmeyer@gmail.com> writes:

    So, what about if we could have [meta] packages that can be installed by
    the user but not used as Build-Depends entries? Please note that for the moment I'm targeting more at the idea itself rather than at the implementation (but I'll certainly love to know if you have an idea on
    how could this be implemented).

    At one point I thought of adding a Lintian test checking for this kind
    of usage, but first and foremost I would like to know if you think this
    is a viable/acceptable idea, maybe even adding a special section in our policy.

    I could have sworn that we already had tags like that in Lintian.
    Certainly, this is a concept that has already existed in Debian for some
    time. There have always been metapackages or other similar cases that are
    only intended for end users and would make no sense as build dependencies,
    such as all of the task-* packages.

    Lintian feels like the right place to put a test like this. If there are dependencies like that which could potentially cause serious issues, those could even be an auto-reject tag.

    I'm not sure that Policy would have much to say about this unless we need
    some mechanism for labeling such packages other than a MR to Lintian. The important information is the list of packages that shouldn't be used this
    way, and the hard part is probably gathering that list.

    --
    Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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  • From Jonathan Dowland@21:1/5 to All on Sun Aug 25 15:50:01 2024
    On Tue Aug 20, 2024 at 12:17 AM BST, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote:
    But users would love to have something like 'qt6-full-dev'. And the
    reason we never provided them with this meta-package is that package maintainers would use it almost everywhere, dragging the whole Qt installation on each package depending on it... This is a _huge_ waste
    of resources and buildd time (or is it not??)

    I think it would be better to use social methods to prevent maintainers
    from doing this, rather than technical ones.

    At one point I thought of adding a Lintian test checking for this kind
    of usage, but first and foremost I would like to know if you think
    this is a viable/acceptable idea, maybe even adding a special section
    in our policy.

    I like the idea of a Lintian check, assuming Lintian accepts checks
    which don't correspond to Policy. I'm not sure it makes sense to try
    and encode this restriction in Policy itself.


    Best wishes,

    --
    Please do not CC me for listmail.

    👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland
    ✎ jmtd@debian.org
    🔗 https://jmtd.net

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