[Pkg-dkms-maint] Bug#887263: dkms should depend on e2fsprogs explicitly

[Andreas Henriksson]

On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 08:03:50PM +0100, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> Package: dkms
[...]
> /usr/sbin/dkms contains mke2fs. According to file it is a Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with very long lines
[...]

Indeed dkms uses both mke2fs and mkdosfs. There's no relation from dkms
towards dosfstools specified in the dkms package either, which would
otherwise be a sign of how important these commands are to dkms
functionality. 

The commands are (only) used from a function called
"make_driver_disk_floppy" which in turn is invoked (via a call chain)
from "make_driver_disk" and that function checks distro which seems to
be specified from commandline flag -d <distro>. (Note that there's no
debian alternative! There is one for ubuntu though.)
The command to invoke the code path seems to be something like
'dkms mkdriverdisk -d <distro> [...]'.
Note that while today we can probably consider floppies to not be so
common anymore, the default media type in dkms mkdriverdisk is floppy.

I'm not sure how important this functionality is, but the entire thing
seems to be pretty overlooked from a Debian perspective which leads
me to assume a Suggests (rather than Recommends or Depends) might be
suitable.

I'm left with a few questions that it would be great to hear maintainers
view on....
* Is the mkdriverdisk functionality useful at all these days? Maybe
  it should just be patched out (and possibly even removed upstream)?
* If useful, shouldn't someone work on a debian distro code-path?
* Shouldn't floppies be considered uncommon enough that the default
  should be changed to something else?
All of these are off-topic in this particular bug report though and
separate bug reports should probably be opened if there's a need
to discuss any of that. Possibly upstream rather than in Debian.

My conclusion here is that it's likely not the end of the world if
we just closed this bug report. If a package relationship should be
added using 'Suggests: dosfstools, e2fsprogs' would likely be the
most suitable. Maintainers view on this would be nice to hear!

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson