[R-pkg-team] Bug#1042406: dh-r: throws "Use of uninitialized value $dep_line in substitution" warnings with some packages

[Nilesh Patra]

On 28 July 2023 1:37:23 am IST, Andreas Tille <andreas at an3as.eu> wrote:
>> The reason that we don't see such problems in for instance
>> r-bioc-bsgenome is because it has some values in the testdepends and
>> recommendsinput ends up having some value[4].
>> 
>> I have attached a patch to fix this, please check.
>
>While reading the patch it definitely fixes the uninitialized value.
>However, it does not fulfill the intended behaviour to add the
>Test-Depends as Recommends.  I'm considering parsing DESCRIPTION
>directly to do so.

I am not sure if I understand this. The behaviour of dh-r for adding recommends with and without the patch is exactly the same, i.e. there's no regression afaics.

If you're saying that relying on d/t/control for testdeps is suboptimal, then that's a different problem.

However IMHO adding test dependencies as recommends is not a good idea at all and I was surprised to see it while reading the code. While I can agree that adding them as recommends can help users run tests, I think the subset of people who actually would be interested in doing so is less. Recommends are installed by default by apt and so this ends up cluttering users system with un-needed stuff.
That said, I maybe missing the history of this decision here.

What do you think?

Thanks
Nilesh