[Debian-ha-maintainers] Bug#1085256: fence-agents: fence-agents package does not depend on any actual package

[Michael Prokop]

Package: fence-agents
Version: 4.15.0-3
Severity: important

Hi,

the fence-agents package in current testing/unstable looks like this:

| % apt-cache show fence-agents
| Package: fence-agents
| Version: 4.15.0-3
| Installed-Size: 13
| Maintainer: Debian HA Maintainers <debian-ha-maintainers at alioth-lists.debian.net>
| Architecture: all
| Recommends: fence-agents-ack-manual, fence-agents-aliyun, fence-agents-alom, fence-agents-apc, fence-agents-apc-snmp, fence-agents-bladecenter, fence-agents-brocade, fence-agents-cdu, fence-agents-cisco-mds, fence-agents-cisco-ucs, fence-agents-crosslink, fence-agents-cyberpower-ssh, fence-agents-docker, fence-agents-drac, fence-agents-drac5, fence-agents-dummy, fence-agents-eaton-snmp, fence-agents-eaton-ssh, fence-agents-ecloud, fence-agents-emerson, fence-agents-eps, fence-agents-hds-cb, fence-agents-heuristics-ping, fence-agents-hpblade, fence-agents-ibmblade, fence-agents-ibm-powervs, fence-agents-ibm-vpc, fence-agents-ibmz, fence-agents-ifmib, fence-agents-ilo2, fence-agents-ilo-moonshot, fence-agents-ilo-mp, fence-agents-ilo-ssh, fence-agents-intelmodular, fence-agents-ipdu, fence-agents-ipmilan, fence-agents-kdump, fence-agents-kubevirt, fence-agents-ldom, fence-agents-lindy-pdu, fence-agents-lpar, fence-agents-mpath, fence-agents-netio, fence-agents-ovh, fence-agents-ovm, fence-agents-powerman, fence-agents-pve, fence-agents-raritan, fence-agents-raritan-px3, fence-agents-rcd-serial, fence-agents-redfish, fence-agents-rhevm, fence-agents-rsa, fence-agents-rsb, fence-agents-sanbox2, fence-agents-scsi, fence-agents-skalar, fence-agents-vbox, fence-agents-virsh, fence-agents-vmware, fence-agents-vmware-rest, fence-agents-vmware-soap, fence-agents-vmware-vcloud, fence-agents-wti, fence-agents-xenapi, fence-virt
| Suggests: fence-agents-amt, fence-agents-aws, fence-agents-azure-arm, fence-agents-compute, fence-agents-gce, fence-agents-ironic, fence-agents-openstack, fence-agents-sbd
| Description-en: Fence Agents for Red Hat Cluster - all agents
|  Red Hat Fence Agents is a collection of scripts to handle remote power
|  management for several devices. They allow failed or unreachable nodes to be
|  forcibly restarted and removed from the cluster.
|  .
|  This package is a metapackage depending on all available fence agents.
| [...]

The fence-agents package itself is "empty":

| % dpkg -L fence-agents
| /.
| /usr
| /usr/share
| /usr/share/doc
| /usr/share/doc/fence-agents
| /usr/share/doc/fence-agents/changelog.Debian.gz
| /usr/share/doc/fence-agents/copyright

And the package does *not* depend on all available fence agents,
they are only recommends.

I'm aware that folks disabling Recommends are supposed to know what
they are doing. But at least in my experience avoiding Recommends is
a common practice esp. amongst server systems where fence-agents has
its use case. And if someone is upgrading fence-agents from bookworm
(v4.12.1-1) to trixie (v4.15.0-3) and isn't aware of this
fence-agents Recommends situation *upfront*, the system will end up
with this empty / broken fence-agents situation.

Even `apt-get install --reinstall --install-recommends fence-agents`
doesn't behave as someone might expect, so AFAICT there's no easy
way out of this situation then.

IMO the fence-agents should:

a) at least depend on fence-agents-common, and:

b) a "fence-agents-all" package which *actually* depends on *all*
  agent packages could further mitigate this situation (the
  fence-agents package itself then could use fence-agents-all in its
  Recommends).

regards
-mika-