Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

> I have a better question: Is there something about empiricism that many
> people on this mailing list cannot cope with?
>
> Back when I had newly joined this mailing list and all of these idle
> allegations and rhetorical questions started being posted, I decided to
> do that thing.... What's it called? Oh, right: 'Checking.'

I too did some checking. From practical experience, one of the ClamAV packages (IIRC it's clamd) has a hard dependency on libsystemd0. Using dpkg --force-depends to install only that package without having libsystemd0 installed results in ... it failing at startup because it can't open the library.

I opened a bug, which was very quickly and quite abusively closed as "won't fix", and was also told that "it doesn't work like that" when I asked if (especially as it was supposedly only one call they ever made on non-systemd systems) why they couldn't do "if exists libsystemd0 then ..." - something which I now know is possible if the dev/packager cares about it.


So after all this, I think I see where some of this division comes from ...
You *appear* to have been working on the basis that it's a "non problem" because the testing you did showed it to be so - for your use case. Some of us have been working on the basis that it *is* a problem because our testing shows it to be so - for our use cases. And we've all failed to pick up on this - a bit like the tory of the blind men and the elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant