Bug#905892: dh_haskell_depends: can generate spurious dependencies on Essential packages

[Sean Whitton]

Package: haskell-devscripts-minimal
Version: 0.13.8
Severity: important

Hello,

The following code in dh_haskell_depends generates the content of the
${haskell:Recommends} substvar for a libghc-*-doc binary package:

    recommends=` \
        find debian/$pkg -name \*.html -exec hxwls -r \{\} \; \
        | sed -e 's,^file:/,,' \
        | grep ^/ \
        | cut -d# -f1 \
        | LANG=C sort -u \
        | xargs -r dpkg -S \
        | cut -d: -f1 \
        | sort -u \
        | sed -e :a -e '$!N; s/\n/, /; ta'`
    dev=`echo $pkg | sed -e 's/^[^-]\+-\(.\+\)-doc/lib${hc}-\1-dev/'`
    grep -av '^#' debian/control | grep $dev > /dev/null \
        && recommends="$recommends, $dev" \
        || recommends="$recommends"

This can generate dependencies on Essential packages, which should never
happen.  For example, in the documentation for version 5.4.1 of
libghc-propellor-dev, there is a link to /etc/default.  util-linux
contains /etc/default/hwclock, so `dpkg -S /etc/default` will return
util-linux, and so the ${haskell:Recommends} substvar will contain
util-linux.  And in fact we get

    Recommends: apt, passwd, util-linux, base-files, libc-bin, bsdmainutils

which is definitely wrong.

This could be fixed by filtering essential packages out of
${haskell:Recommends}, but in fact I think that this code is overeager
in adding recommendations, and should probably just be dropped.

I am working around this bug by dropping ${haskell:Recommends} from the
libghc-propellor-doc binary package stanza in debian/control.

-- 
Sean Whitton
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