[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#1089174: facter: Facter should depend on ruby-sys-filesystem

[Jérôme Charaoui]

Hello,

On Fri, 06 Dec 2024 17:41:02 +0000 Jesse Hathaway 
<jhathaway at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Package: facter
> Version: 4.3.0-2
> Severity: normal
> 
> Facter lists sys-filesystem as a development dependency in their
> gemspec, but this was evidently done to allow for gem installs with a C
> compiler as detailed in d7f954944780791c5a0bc3b1aedc669b5d73281f.
> However, without this dependency the mountpoints fact returns no data
> and the partitions fact does not return mount data. Puppet's published
> packages include sys-filesystem. Given the C compiler problem is not an
> issue for Debian's package, I think ruby-sys-filesystem should be a
> dependency rather than a recommends.

I'm not convinced that unavailable partitions and mount facts render the 
facter package necessarily broken. The same could be said about all the 
other Recommended packages, like dmidecode and virt-what, for example, 
because facter works fine without them but it will report more 
information if they're available.

I'm curious to understand under what scenario the facter package is 
being installed without its "Recommends:".

As a reminder, section 7.1 of the Debian Policy states the following 
with regards to Recommends:

"This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.

The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together 
with this one in all but unusual installations."

I think ruby-sys-filesystem, and the others, fit this description.

Thanks,

-- Jérôme