Bug#739161: marsshooter: incorrect dependency strength on fonts

[Markus Koschany]

Control: tags -1 moreinfo

On 16.02.2014 11:37, bmorel wrote:
> Package: marsshooter
> Version: 0.7.5-2
> Severity: normal
> File: /usr/games/mars
> 
> marsshooter "depends" on 3 fonts ( fonts-gargi, fonts-wqy-microhei and
> fonts-tlwg-waree ) but works perfectly fine without them. ( I used #dpkg
> --force-all --purge fonts-gargi fonts-tlwg-waree fonts-wqy-microhei )
> They should probably be only recommended ( note that I did not tried with
> fonts-dejavu, but it is probably the same, except that this font is probably
> really used by my system, of course ).

Hello,

it depends on your point of view and whether you are Chinese or Thai or
not. M.A.R.S. supports many different languages and not all chars and
glyphs can be provided by fonts-dejavu.

That means if you switch to the Chinese language in the option menu,
without those fonts nothing meaningful will be displayed on your screen.
If I were Chinese I would then file a bug report against marsshooter.

Debian Policy 7.2 is quite clear about the meaning of "Depends" and
"Recommends"

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html

"The Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is required
for the depending package to provide a significant amount of functionality."

I think the fonts provide this "significant amount of functionality"
here because without them some languages will not be displayed correctly
and the in-game menu will become non-functional.

Please also note that these fonts are normally integrated in the
upstream version of M.A.R.S. For reasons of deduplication and efficiency
we only link to corresponding fonts packages in Debian, so that bugs in
font packages can be fixed speedily and without having to interact with
hundreds of packages separately.

In short: I do not think this is a bug and the package must depend on
these fonts to work correctly for all users.

Please report back, if you agree with this answer.

Regards,

Markus

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