Bug#852230: unknown-horizons: have another program where dependencies are sorted out for unknown-horizons.

[Vincent Cheng]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 10:49 AM, Markus Koschany <apo at debian.org> wrote:
>> On 22.01.2017 19:30, shirish शिरीष wrote:
>>> Package: unknown-horizons
>>> Version: 2017.1+ds-2
>>> Severity: wishlist
>>>
>>> Dear Maintainer,
>>> Right now what happens is if there are any change/s to the depends or
>>> recommends then the unknown-horizons binary gets downloaded each time.
>>> This is waste of time and bandwidth from the user as well as Debian's
>>> server/mirror perspective.
>>>
>>> It would be much better and much more highly efficient (probably) if
>>> we have a small program which deals with all or any changes with
>>> depends or recommends.
>>>
>>> Unknown-horizons binary should only be disturbed when the change
>>> directly affects unknown-horizons, otherwise not.
>
> This is the way how it works in Debian and not a bug in unknown-horizons
> by the way. If you make a change to the source package regarding
> build-dependencies or dependencies then it must be rebuilt because
> information about dependencies are stored in your deb file.
>
> Your "small program" still needs to know what has changed and retrieve
> the information from somewhere, a database maybe. You need to implement
> this change so that all packages in the archive will continue to work.
> Not a small feat. You should discuss this with the maintainer(s) of dpkg
> or on a public mailing list. Unknown-Horizons is the wrong package though.

Strictly speaking, you can accomodate this request by splitting up
src:unknown-horizons into two separate source packages, one which
builds a binary deb that contains the game binary. the other which
builds a binary deb containing all the game data. The only issue with
this approach is that I personally hate mangling upstream source
tarballs, so I only do this if upstream releases separate source
tarballs for the game engine and data (e.g. src:0ad and src:0ad-data).
Punting it over to dpkg's side of the fence is unnecessary IMHO (and I
don't think there's anything reasonable that can be done on the dpkg
side of things that wouldn't be better implemented using the split
source package approach).

Regards,
Vincent