Bug#739161: marsshooter: incorrect dependency strength on fonts

[berenger.morel at neutralite.org]

Le 16.02.2014 14:53, Markus Koschany a écrit :
> 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

I see your point. To be honest, I would not name what I reported a bug, 
but a suggestion ( since for me, a bug is a wrong behavior ). AFAIK, 
there is no "suggestionreport" tool in debian :)

I did not meant that asian users should not be able to use correct 
fonts, but that an asian user will probably not need european fonts, and 
european people won't need asian ones. Plus, any user might simply 
prefer the font he installed himself on his computer instead of dejavu ( 
I quickly did a try without any fonts mars needed, it was able to find 
one and go with it. I think that it did not even changed font, which 
would mean that I have dejavu installed for nothing, so I'll investigate 
on how fonts are managed on my system later... ).

It sounds like having an explicit dependency to xorg on graphical 
softwares. Almost no one have it, they rely on the system to already 
have it. Maybe that's wrong, I do not know, but it makes me think that 
the better solution would be a recommend dependency.

However, if you prefer to keep the strong dependency, what about 
depending on "at least one of those fonts"?
Opera does that, for fonts, and other packages likes xserver-xorg does 
that for other kinds of things. Some even does that with libraries 
(which probably is not as easy as for things like fonts, because of 
linkage).
I think that this way would be a good compromise. People would still 
have a fonts required, but at least they would not have all fonts for 
nothing.