What about the removed dependencies?

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi,

2012/5/2 Dominique Dumont <dod at debian.org>:
> I think we should follow up on these bugs by mentioning that the impacted
> packages are fixed and we won't fix them unless a *lot* (i.e. more than 10) of
> packages are FTBS because of this change.

These are the numbers of packages depending on the libraries:

$ aptitude search '~Dlibsdl-image1.2' | wc -l
153

$ aptitude search '~Dlibsdl-mixer1.2' | wc -l
184

$ aptitude search '~Dlibsdl1.2' | wc -l
422

$ aptitude search '?or(~Dlibsdl1.2, ?or(~Dlibsdl-mixer1.2,
~Dlibsdl-image1.2))' | wc -l
427

This means that all of their sources build-depend on each of the
SDL-*-dev packages, the last one on any one of them.

I think that many of the packages depending on them are games possibly
abandoned upstream long time ago, or which are not updated very often,
and possibly semi-unmaintained in Debian (so even if there are actual
FTBFS submitted to them, maybe nobody notice).  So, in summary, I
think that the absence of more complaints is not very significant,
meaning: it doesn't mean that the only 3 bugs that we have heard about
are the only ones.

Now, I think that your explanation of the problem is clear and that,
after all, the responsibility for including the -dev files lies on the
packages depending on SDL.

But, as I said previously, I think that it will be an error to go
ahead with us removing the dependencies at this point in time, with
several transitions going on (e.g. libpng15) that intersect with sets
of packages depending on sdl-image1.2, and the freeze in sight -- it
will only increase the burden of those helping to create a better
release, and waste their time, for little gain.  We lived for many
years with these dependencies, without anybody complaining very loudly
(apparently), so I don't think that it will hurt to much to have it
for a few more months.

I'm not in favour of spending time seeing which of these 400+ will
fail to build, either.

So, finally, I propose to drop them in
{SDL2,immediately-after-release}, whichever comes first.

Cheers.