stuck

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 05:38:58PM +0200, Loïc Minier wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2006, Martin Pitt wrote:
> >                                                   I don't know which
> > 'maintenance burden' Loic talks about, installing some files into
> > package B instead of A is certainly not a burden.
> 
>  I talk about the fact that it will be harder to get dependencies right
>  for new releases (or for new packages); we currently can rely on
>  upstream information such as NEWS / README / INSTALL or
>  configure.{in,ac} to find out which packages are needed.
> 
>  Take for example update-manager, which is said to currently only need
>  the gconf module, and hence depends on python-gnome2, it could start
>  requiring a new Python module from python-gnome2, say canvas, bonobo,
>  or vfs.  How would we notice?  By grepping the sources on each new
>  upstream release, grepping on the imports?  What if the import is
>  conditionnal?

This is already the case for every upstream which we (or Debian) split into
multiple binary packages, and this is generally considered to be worth the
tradeoff.  Missing dependencies are easily discovered by users and easily
fixed by developers when they arise.  I don't think this general argument
outweighs the benefits in this case.

-- 
 - mdz