>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes:
Russ> krb5-config on a system without a compiler. In general, all
Russ> *-dev packages in Debian are only useful with a compiler,
Russ> since their whole purpose is to provide support for linking
Russ> new binaries with libraries. We generally don't make that
Russ> dependency explicit, though, since it adds a lot of edges to
Russ> the dependency graph and it's not clear they serve much
Russ> purpose.Ah, thanks for saving me the trouble to ask what common practice is here. We could represent this as a dependency or a recommends if there is some special reason that libkrb5-dev needs the dependency. krb5-config not working alone is not enough to justify a depends relationship: as I understand it (Russ please correct me if I'm getting this wrong from memory), the policy requirement is not that every program in a package work with the installed dependencies, but that the package as a whole work. I.E. I could say that we care far more about the pkgconfig .pc files, krb5-config is legacy, and so policy does not force us to depend on a compiler even though krb5-config is kind of useless without it. But if there's some special reason that we need a compiler dependency (or recommendation) I think we have options. There does appear to be a c-compiler virtual package. We could depend on gcc|c-compiler. It looks like over the years, a few things have provided c-compiler that probably shouldn't (for example bcc, a 16-bit x86 only c-compiler). But the list appears reasonably clean now. I did try krb5-config with pcc as /usr/bin/cc, and it did work. But like Russ, I'd want to see a special reason why libkrb5-dev needs a dependency.
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