Bug#286779: Dependency Hell Installing dia-common 0.94

[Bryan Batten]

Package: dia-common
Version: 0.94.0-3
Distribution: unstable

Trying to install the Debian unstable packages for dia-gnome requires
dia-libs and dia-common. Fair enough. However, dia-common, depends on 
python-gtk2; python-gtk2 depends on python2.3-gtk2; and python2.3-gtk2 
ends up depending on hurd! (This seems not to be the case in the 
testing distribution) This is a lot bigger dependency list than is the 
case with what I currently have - Debian woody 0.88.1-3.

Hurd is a 2.1MB file. For dial-up users like me it makes the upgrade 
process just a little more daunting.

The file list for the python-gtk2 package (which is the immediate
culprit) shows that its basically just a set of text files. So it 
would seem that it really doesn't need to be a dependency.

If the intent is to provide bindings to export dia services to
interpreters such as Python, it would seem logical to make those 
bindings depend on dia-common, rather than the other way around. No?

Doing so would have the result that dia would install with fewer
dependencies, thus doing its part to slow the growth of 'Dependency 
Hell', making installation easier, reducing the chance of circular 
dependencies, and the chance of errors due to interfaces to dependent 
packages changing.

I'm using Debian woody, with selected components from sarge.