On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 01:27:19PM +0200, Antony Stone wrote:

[cut]

>
> > Just to make an example, it is still very hard for me to understand
> > why a packge like grace (which is a lesstif program to produce X-Y
> > plots) should depend on gconf2. The motivation provided by the
> > maintainer is that he decided to include a thumbnailer which allow
> > GNOME-related file managers to provide a preview of grace files, and
> > gconf was not able to add the needed xml stanzas easily if it was not
> > already installed. Hence, they required gconf to be installed before
> > grace in order for this thumbnailer to be recognised by gconf.
>
> No chance of getting things like this reduced from "depends" to "recommends",
> I suppose?
>

I asked the maintainer if he could do that, and he gently explained me
that a bug in gconf didn't allow anything less than a Depends: (so a
lesstif package has a Depends: on gconf because a GNOME-related goodie
added by the Debian maintainer requires gconf, and gconf has a bug
which does not allow to use the GNOME-related additional goodie if it
is not already installed when the lesstif app gets installed. And we
still think that this is not *TOTALLY* *SICK* o_O).

He kindly promised he would have looked into that after stretch is
out. The dependency was introduced in 2007.

The alternative solution would be to fork the package for Devuan, and
add it to the pile. All this madness would have been unnecessary if
the entanglement with GNOME had not been seen as a necessity by a lot
of Debian maintainers.

My2Cents

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
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