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

[Valentin Vidic]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 12:03:26PM +0200, Michael Prokop wrote:
> 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.

Right, the split was done exactly to benefit server systems so they
don't have to install 1GB of dependencies for agents they don't use.

> IMO the fence-agents should:
> 
> a) at least depend on fence-agents-common, and:

Not sure how this helps with the transition? This is a common library
and most agents depend on it directly.

> 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).

Would it be better for fence-agents-all to replace fence-agent than?

-- 
Valentin