[Pkg-puppet-devel] facter's dependence on gem2deb

[David N. Blank-Edelman]

Hi Packaging People-

I'm in the process of trying to create facter .deb packages from the 
Debian git repository via git-buildpackage because the official Ubuntu 
LTS (Lucid) versions available are quite far behind from the mainline 
Puppet Labs releases. I'm fairly new to this process so I apologize in 
advance if the following question is highly naive or blatantly obvious.

One of the things that makes this task "interesting" is the control file 
declares a dependency on gem2deb:

Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 8), gem2deb (>= 0.2.4~)

This is tricky for my purposes because gem2deb doesn't officially hit 
the Ubuntu universe until three releases after the LTS one (first 
appears in Ocelot). I'm wondering if someone on the packaging team would 
be willing to explain why this dependency was declared?

I can probably hack gem2deb into place to build the package, but I'm 
trying to cut down on the number of yaks I'm shaving. Thanks for any 
info you can provide!

    -- dNb

P.S. As a related aside, the other interesting dependency is on 
ruby-json, which also doesn't hit Ubuntu until Ocelot. Still working on 
that one because there are some circular dependency issues going on when 
I try to bludgeon things into place.