[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)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi James,

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 12:28:58PM +0100, James Cowgill wrote:
> 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.

Ahhh, good hint.  So the solution to my problem would rather be to
drop dh_linktree? (Raphael in CC whether I might have missed something).

Kind regards

     Andreas.

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