[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#786780: Metastudent and its data (Was: Bug#786780: metastudent has circular Depends on metastudent-data)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Tobias,

at first thanks for maintaining metastudent in the Debian Med team.  I
guess you did not yet realised this bug report since there is no
response in the bug log.  Please note that bugs in the Debian BTS are
sent only to the Maintainer (in this case our mailing list).  If you
consider the mailing list as to high volume it would be good if you
would subscribe the packages you maintain in the Package Tracking
System[1].  This would enable you to get all relevant information about
a restricted set of packages via e-mail.

To work on the said problem I started looking into the metastudent
package first (please svn up).  Besides some minor lintian issues
I mainly changed two things:

  1. Copy of /usr/share/metastudent/metastudentrc.default in
     /etc/metastudentrc
     If the manpage is correct this overrides the configuration
     above.  Configuration files in Debian should always go to
     etc - so this is fullfilled.
  2. change metastudent-data from Depends to Recommends

The rationale of the second change is that if a user has some other
database (be it local or whatever) the config file could be adapted and
metastudent could be run sensibly without the metastudent-data package.
At least this is my naive view on this - please correct me if I'm wrong
since I'm no metastudent user.

So far for metastudnet however, this change is not yet the final
solution for the said bug.  I agree with the bug reporter that the data
package does not really depends from metastudent binary and the relation
is at best a Recommends if not only Suggests or Enhances.

Besides this I wonder about the role of the metastudent-data-2 package.
Is it correct that metastudent does not necessarily need
metastudent-data but also could run sensibly with just
metastudent-data-2?  If the latter would be the case I suggest the
following:

   1. find a better name for metastudent-data (perhaps
      metastudent-dataset-201401)
   2. Add
         Provides: metastudent-data
      to its control file
   3. Use
         Recommends: metastudent-dataset-201401 | metastudent-data
   4. May be also metastudent-data-2 should be named
      metastudent-dataset-201012 to follow the logic above
      and also get the
         Provides: metastudent-data

This would reflect my assumption about the role of the (currently) two
data sets.  If you confirm that metastudent can run with any of these
data sets I'd recommend implementing this (and I also volunteer to
implement it if something might be unclear at your side.)

Kind regards

      Andreas.

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 04:19:21PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> Package: metastudent
> Version: 2.0.1-1
> Severity: important
> 
> Hello Debian Med Packaging Team,
> 
> There is a circular dependency between metastudent and metastudent-data:
> 
> metastudent 	:Depends: metastudent-data (>= 2.0.0)
> metastudent-data 	:Depends: metastudent (>= 2.0.0)
> 
> Circular dependencies are known to cause problems during upgrade,
> so we should try to get rid of them.
> 
> Since metastudent is a data package, it is quite likely it does not need
> actually to depend on metastudent-data and removing this dependency would
> remove the circular dependency, so I would suggest you do so.
> 
> See threads 
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg02111.html
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/11/msg01101.html
> 
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Bill. <ballombe at debian.org>

[1] https://packages.qa.debian.org/

-- 
http://fam-tille.de