[Pkg-nagios-devel] Bug#569028: Bug#569028: nagios-plugins-standard: please move some depends to recommends

[Jan Wagner]

Hi Helmut,

thanks for your bugreport.

On Tuesday, 9. February 2010, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> The nagios-plugins-standard package pulls in tons of dependencies that
> are completely useless to me. This is the depends header:

When the package was created, there was no automatically installation of 
recommands. As know, this changed over the time. Anyways ... the purpos for 
the standard package was, to provide checks which has depencies, so this 
package has indeed a amount of dependencies.
 
Under the actual conditions, we can improve the situation. Technical, it's 
easy to move the packages, which are not linked by nagios-plugins-standard, to 
Recommands. Anyways, it would be nice to give the users a plan, which plugin 
binary of the nagios-plugins-standard package depends on what package.
For this purpos I created README.Debian.plugins.

> Depends:
> 	libc6 (>= 2.3),
> Unavoidable.

ACK

> 	libldap-2.4-2 (>= 2.4.7),
> 	libmysqlclient16 (>= 5.1.21-1),
> 	libpq5 (>= 8.4~0cvs20090328),
> 	libradiusclient-ng2,
> The four above are probably not required by all setups, so they might be
> candidates for recommends. Having binaries with missing libraries is a
> bit weird, these are better kept.
> 	zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4),
> Probably unavoidable.

These depencies are created by the ${shlibs:Depends} macro and dh_shlibdeps, 
cause the where used at link time. Indeed, this maybe can turned into 
Recommands, something similar is done by collectd, but it requires more work 
and substantial changes to the package. I'm unlikely to change this in a hurry 
short before the freeze.
Maybe some more work will follow (possible post squeeze), but patches are 
welcome anytime.

> 	fping,
> 	snmp,
> 	radiusclient1,
> 	libnet-snmp-perl,
> 	dnsutils,
> 	bind9-host | host,
> 	smbclient,
> The seven above are good candidates for recommends.

As told, I moved them to Redcommands and tried to document the dependencies in 
README.Debian.plugins. As there is no common way how the binaries are used 
(e.g. via values) within the plugins and as it is a mix of perl- and c-code, 
it's not so easy to spot them, I hopefully didn't have missed any. As always 
... improvements and fixes are welcome.

The changes[1] are medium size, the commit is r1860:

 README.Debian         |    9 ++++++++
 README.Debian.plugins |   54 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 changelog             |    4 ++-
 control               |    6 ++---
 docs                  |    1 
 5 files changed, 70 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)


> 	ucf,
> Probably unavoidable.
> 	nagios-plugins-basic (>= 1.4.5-2)
> This is better kept.

ACK

With kind regards, Jan.
[1] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-nagios/?op=comp&compare[]=%2Fnagios-
plugins at 1859&compare[]=%2Fnagios-plugins at 1860
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