[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#676455: ${misc:Depends} injects broken versioned depends (Was: Bug#676455: gnumed-doc: uninstallable in sid: depends on outdated libjs-jquery-livequery)

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Jun 07, 2012 at 12:24:35PM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> 
> It the next upstream version of your javascript library provides new
> files, they will not be in the symlink tree that you built in your
> package. So at runtime, it will fail because of the missing file.

Yes, and if a future version of *any* library will change its ABI it
will fail as well and we do not force the strict dependency anyway.  So
my question is rather, in how far such dh_linktree-ed JS libraries
deserve that specific care we do not implement otherwise.
 
> On the opposite, if some files are dropped, you will have broken symlinks
> lying around.

That's correct *if* the authors of the JS libraries do not care properly
for their users but as I said this is also the case for any dependency
in Debian that might change something.  In how far is a broken symlink
more critical than other breakages?
 
> > > I should probably say a word about this in the dh_linktree manual page.
> > 
> > Not only say a word about it but rather warn about it.
> 
> Note that if you use "replace" instead of "deduplicate" or "embed", then
> you get a dependency that is less strict (withous upper bound) on the basis
> that "replace" is like "deduplicate" except that you're confident that
> both versions are compatible and are likely to stay that way.

OK, I might give it a try.

Thanks for the clarification

      Andreas. 

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