[debhelper-devel] Bug#747141: debhelper: dh_installdocs --link-doc forces source-version dependencies

[Stephen Kitt]

Package: debhelper
Version: 9.20140228
Severity: important

Hi Joey,

The potential bug referred to in #676777, namely that the strictly
versioned dependency introduced by dh_installdocs --link-doc can cause
packages to no longer be installable, is occurring with my
gcc-mingw-w64 packages.

Admittedly the way I'm using versions is a bit unconventional, but I
don't think it goes against policy... I have a simple, native source
version (12 currently in unstable, 13 in the package I'm working on),
but all the binary packages are built using my package source along
with gcc-4.8-source (gcc-4.9-source in the version I'm working on),
and use binary version of the form ${gcc:Version}+${source:Version},
e.g. 4.9.0-2+13.

My package correctly handled the documentation link with a strictly
versioned dependency on the binary version. With the fix for #676777,
dh_installdocs also introduces a strict dependency on the source
version, which can't be satisfied...

I'm afraid my perl-fu isn't up to fixing this quickly. In any case I'm
not sure what the correct fix should be; I guess the right thing to do
would be to determine the binary version of the packages being linked
to and use that, but I don't know how to go about that within
debhelper.

Regards,

Stephen


-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (200, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.14-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii  binutils    2.24.51.20140425-1
ii  dpkg        1.17.9
ii  dpkg-dev    1.17.9
ii  file        1:5.17-1
ii  man-db      2.6.7.1-1
ii  perl        5.18.2-2+b1
ii  po-debconf  1.0.16+nmu2

debhelper recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debhelper suggests:
ii  dh-make  0.63

-- no debconf information