[Letsencrypt-devel] Bug#819854: wouldn't Recommends: be better?

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Pirate Praveen wrote:
> On 2016, ഏപ്രിൽ 4 3:55:41 AM IST, Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org> wrote:
> >> > we can make letsencrypt optional.
> >
> > Huh? Now that's a strange request.
> 
> How is it strange? How is it not different from dbconfig-no-thanks?

dbconfig is something Debian-specific and used by _many_ packages and
there are probably very little users who don't want that and are
capable of managing this.

The fact that gitlab uses letsencrypt seems something that upstream
has decided on. And so far, gitlab is the only package which depends
on letsencrypt. Additionally, letsencrypt can be considered
controversial.

And actually, I don't know why there is a dbconfig-no-thanks package
at all. My guess is that just skipping dbcommon doesn't work and the
file /usr/share/dbconfig-common/internal/dbc-no-thanks is required.
Which sounds like a bug in its design.

Anyway, the general idea of …-no-thanks packages still looks fishy to
me and I surely would avoid to introduce more such packages instead of
using Recommends — which is clearly meant for such situations.

> If it is just in Recommends, you have to disable recommends for each
> package that uses letsencrypt.

Why doesn't "apt-get install gitlab letsencrypt-" suffice? (Same for
aptitude. Actually aptitude had that feature earlier. And
interactively that situation is like cake in aptitude's TUI.)

> I want this as depends but allow people to opt out.
> dbconfig-no-thanks was a perfect solution

It looks to me like a very hacky solution which works around the
system and should be avoided whereever possible.

> This is already done in gitlab.

Then everything should be fine already.

> If you don't think this is a good idea, you may close this bug.

I've Cc'ed letsencrypt-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org to get another
opinion on that, but I doubt that this will change the situation.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
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