[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#820879: How to avoid version restrictions for JS libraries (Was: Bug#820879: r-cran-shiny: uninstallable in sid: Depends: libjs-jquery (< 1.11.3+dfsg.0~) but 1.12.3-1 is to be installed)

[James Cowgill]

Hi,

On Wed, 2016-04-13 at 13:13 +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> via this bug I learned (the hard way) that a
> 
>    Depends: ${js:Depends}
> 
> will be resolved into
> 
>    libjs-jquery (<< 1.11.3+dfsg.0~), libjs-jquery (>= 1.11.3+dfsg)
> 
> (for instance) in the final package.  I have no reason to assume that
> the actual version that was available at package build time is the
> only
> valid dependency for my package.  So it seems unadvisable to use
> ${js:Depends} depends at all to avoid continuous uploading of the
> package (depending from 9 different libjs-* packages) if any of its
> libjs-* was uploaded with a new version.
> 
> I wonder what the idea behind this resulution of the ${js:Depends}
> would be since I have the feeling that this is not sensible in the
> most practical cases.
> 
> Am I missing something?

I think those dependencies come from dh_linktree and are placed in
${misc:Depends}, not ${js:Depends}.

dh_linktree(1) contains this:

Since symlink trees are created statically at build-time, they are not
very future-proof and have a risk to miss some files introduced by a
newer version of the package providing the file tree which is
duplicated. That's why the generated dependencies generally ensure that
the same upstream version be used at run-time than at build-time.

James
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