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

[Michael Prokop]

Hi!

* Valentin Vidic [Thu Oct 17, 2024 at 03:12:59PM +0200]:
> 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.

fence-agents on plain bookworm is 216 MB including all its
dependencies, but I get what you're saying and agree. :)

> > 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.

I would assume that someone installing fence-agents for sure also
wants to always have /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/fence-agents.conf then?

Also /usr/share/fence/fencing.py is essential for anyone writing
their own / custom fence agents (as it has been observed in the
customer's environment where I ran into this issue). If someone has
fence-agents present on bookworm and updates the system without
Recommends, even such custom fence agents would break then if
/usr/share/fence/fencing.py isn't available then, since fence-agents
doesn't depend on fence-agents-common.

Really no hard feelings from my side (since one can then depend on
fence-agents-common once you're aware of it), but it feels like this
is asking for upgrade troubles in trixie to me. Or to put it
different: would there be any actual drawback in depending on
fence-agents-common within fence-agents? *hmmm*

> > 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?

That could be worth a thought, yes. Having a good upgrade path even
for users without Recommends enabled, but at the same time also
having the option to install only *certain* fence-agents is
definitely a worthwhile goal. :)

regards
-mika-
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