[Pkg-electronics-devel] Bug#478710: Need advice

[Bill Allombert]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 09:26:55AM +0200, أحمد المحمودي wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 01:34:49PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 04:45:57PM +0200, أحمد المحمودي wrote:
> > >   The only reason that we need pcb-common to Depend on
> > >   pcb-gtk | pcb-lesstif
> > >   
> > >   is because there's an upstream desktop entry 
> > >   /usr/share/applications/pcb.desktop installed in pcb-common, this 
> > >   desktop entry executes the binary 'pcb' which will only exist if either 
> > >   pcb-gtk or pcb-lesstif is installed.
> > > 
> > >   So, is it ok to remove this "pcb-gtk | pcb-lesstif" dependancy in this 
> > >   case ? That would mean that a user could install pcb-common, yet 
> > >   without installing any of pcb-gtk nor pcb-lesstif, so he will have a 
> > >   desktop entry without having the binary that should be executed by 
> > >   this desktop entry.
> > 
> > For what it's worth, it's not universally agreed that these circular
> > dependencies are evil and must be fixed. In this case all the relevant
> > binary packages come from the same source, so there is no reason for
> > version skew.

Whether they came from the same source package or not is irrelevant to
apt-get and dpkg.  User are allowed (and forced in fact) to do partial
upgrades.

>   Well, I think I'll go with your point, since using TryExec was a bad 
>   idea, as it makes the desktop file not appear in the menu !

I suppose the issue is that you did something like
TryExec: /usr/bin/pcb
but /usr/bin/pcb is a symlink and somehow the desktop environment does not
deal with symlinks. I think this is a bug in the desktop environment.

Maybe you can add one .desktop file in pcb-gtk and another on pcb-lesstif
and also manage them with the alternative system.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe at debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.