[Pkg-aide-maintainers] Bug#545852: aide-common has circular Depends on aide

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 05:49:56PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> There is a circular dependency between aide-common and aide:
> 
> aide-common 	:Depends: aide | aide-binary
> aide 	        :Depends: aide-common (= 0.13.1-11)
> 
> Circular dependencies are known to cause problems during upgrade,

As the aide packages have been like this for at least two stable
releases, and I haven't heard of any problems, I'd like to know more
about the possible evil things that could happen.

The aide binary packages do not have any maintainer scripts, so the
only thing important is that the binary package is present and
_unpacked_ before aide-common is configured. afaik, dpkg breaks
circular dependencies at the package that doesn't have maintainer
scripts and will thus do the right thing with aide.

Removing aide-common's dependency on any aide binary package would
mean changing all scripts to gracefully handle the (senseless) case
where aide-common is installed without any aide binary package. I'd
rather avoid that additional complexity.

For the time being, I'm tempted to tag this bug wontfix unless
somebody explains to me what could happen and why it didn't already
happen in a past release.

Greetings
Marc

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