[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#665326: Bug#665326: confused by disapparance of octave-depends (nothing in changelog)

[Sébastien Villemot]

Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at laboissiere.net> writes:

> Let us revisit this issue.  I am considering to reintroduce the
> octave-depends script into the liboctave-dev package.  This script was
> formerly shipped with the octaveX.Y-headers package and was a handy way
> of substituting ${octave:Depends} in debian/control, such that both the
> package name and version appeared in the final relationship, something
> like this:
>
>     Depends: octave3.2 (>= 3.2.4)
>
> We abandoned versioned package names, but an octave-depends script could
> still be useful nowadays to get:
>
>     Depends: ${octave:Depends}
>     
> replaced by:
>
>     Depends: octave (>= 3.6.1)
>
> so that the version of Octave in the relationship will match the one used
> when the package was built.  There are some packages in Debian that use
> octave-depends, like xmds and libgdf, and it would be a courtesy of ours
> to not break their debian/rules.
>
> There is some confusion around this issue because the same tag
> ${octave:Depends} is used by octave-pkg-dev in the building of the
> Octave-Forge packages.  Unfortunately, this happened for historical
> reasons, not by design.
>
> What you think about reintroducing the octave-depends script?

I have no objection, but neither do I really see the benefits, apart
From being kind to our reverse depends.

I think this kind of versioned dependency only has an impact if there
are different versions of octave between testing and unstable. In this
case, the package depending on octave would only migrate to testing when
octave itself migrates to testing. This setup is good if the new octave
version is indeed a minimal requirement of the package, but it is bad
otherwise because it can possibly delay the migration of the package for
no good reason. On average I am not sure this is a net gain.

But maybe you had other cases in mind?

-- 
Sébastien Villemot
Researcher in Economics & Debian Maintainer
http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 835 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-octave-devel/attachments/20120330/1bc1025f/attachment.pgp>