[Parted-maintainers] Bug#1052462: parted: libparted2 package dependencies (dmidecode) differ between arm64 and amd64

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Sep 22, 2023 at 03:41:53PM +0100, Phil Roche wrote:
> While working on new arm64 Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic minimal cloud images
> (http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/minimal/daily/mantic/) we discovered that
> `dmidecode` was not being installed in the arm64 images.
> 
> In debugging, I found that the package dependencies of the libparted2
> package
> differ between arm64 and amd64. arm64 `libparted2` does not depend on
> `dmidecode` but on amd64 it does.

This is intentional, because libparted only uses dmidecode for
identifying old Intel Macs with special GPT quirks, and that's only
relevant on x86.  I don't personally see why this needs to be extended
to arm64, although of course if somebody comes forward and explicitly
confirms that it's relevant to partitioning on Apple Silicon or whatever
then we could do that - but I wouldn't do it just for architectural
symmetry.

If you explicitly need dmidecode to be on your images, then I think you
should have an explicit dependency or similar to ensure that, rather
than relying on a dependency via libparted (which is an implementation
detail).  Is that a problem?

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at debian.org]