Troubles with dependency changes?

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Jonathan Lange wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Bazaar 1.14 adds a new dependency, zlibg-dev. This caused us some
> problems on Launchpad when we wanted to start rolling out the latest
> Bazaar to our servers.
> 

You only need it to *build* the package. I don't think you need it to
*run* bzr. (put in other terms "Depends:" versus "Build-Depends:")

We sort of depend on 'libz.so' being available, but pretty much every
Linux machine in existence has that somewhere.

Python itself bundles zlib on Windows, the main problem being that they
statically compile it, and don't export any of the simples, so we have
to link against *yet another* copy... :(


> What should we, the Launchpad codehosting team, do to avoid getting
> caught out by this in future? What could the Bazaar community do to
> help us?

Pay close attention on the mailing list when I explicitly outlined this
case? (Yes I know I send a lot of email, and this argument probably
doesn't scale particularly well.)

My guess is that we just need to put something in NEWS in something like
"Changes" that declares "to build bzr you now need the zlib development
libs".

We still haven't fully fleshed out how we are going to depend on zlib on
Windows, since the build rules are quite a bit different. (You are
supposed to compile against '-lzlib1' rather than '-lz', IIRC.)


> 
> I was thinking that maybe the Bazaar wiki could grow a "Deploying
> Bazaar" page that we could subscribe to. Not the best idea though.
> 
> Maybe it's not a huge deal. Interested in your thoughts though.
> jml
> 
> 

John
=:->

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