[Bug 1888280] Re: dctrl-tools should be dependency of debian-goodies

[Axel Beckert]

Nope. It's exactly as it should be for packages with a collection of
small tools like e.g. debian-goodies or devscripts:

* Dependencies of all or at least most tools are in Depends.
* Hard dependencies which just appear in one or very few tools are in Recommends. (Other tools in the package are still usable then and if you only need them, there must to be a way to not install dependencies of the other, unused tools.)
* Optional dependencies of any tool are just in Suggests.

Besides:

* Recommends are installed by default. As you've shown, you explicitly
need to disable them to get into that situation. And as the
documentation (at least Debian's) says: You're then on your own if
something doesn't work because of that.

* The package description explains very verbose which tool needs which
of the Recommends and Suggests.

** Changed in: debian-goodies (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Invalid

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1888280

Title:
  dctrl-tools should be dependency of debian-goodies

Status in debian-goodies package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  I think dctrl-tools should be a dependency of debian-goodies, not just
  a recommended package.

  $ sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends debian-goodies
  Reading package lists... Done
  Building dependency tree
  Reading state information... Done
  Suggested packages:
    konqueror libgnome2-bin
  Recommended packages:
    dctrl-tools elfutils libipc-system-simple-perl libfile-which-perl popularity-contest
  The following NEW packages will be installed:
    debian-goodies
  0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  Need to get 69.6 kB of archives.
  After this operation, 222 kB of additional disk space will be used.
  Get:1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/main amd64 debian-goodies all 0.84 [69.6 kB]
  Fetched 69.6 kB in 0s (1,131 kB/s)
  Selecting previously unselected package debian-goodies.
  (Reading database ... 138758 files and directories currently installed.)
  Preparing to unpack .../debian-goodies_0.84_all.deb ...
  Unpacking debian-goodies (0.84) ...
  Setting up debian-goodies (0.84) ...
  Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ...

  $ dpigs
  /usr/bin/dpigs: 91: grep-status: not found

  grep-status is part of dctrl-tools, and when I install dctrl-tools,
  dpigs works fine.

  I'm using Ubuntu 20.04.

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