Russ Allbery writes ("Re: Depends/Recommends from libraries"):
> I think this would be a great way of introducing spurious bugs in our
> distribution from [developers] who don't happen to read the README
> file and miss dependencies they actually need because they're used
> to Debian properly picking up shared library dependencies and to the
> dependencies of any given package being fully self-contained. Both
> of which, I should add, are major *features* of our distribution
> that many of us have worked very hard to achieve. I'm opposed.
>
> Now, if this were taken a further step so that dpkg-shlibdeps would
> provide some mechanism to *automatically* add those downstream
> dependencies to packages that depend on the library unless the
> dependencies were explicitly suppressed, I wouldn't be as strongly
> opposed.
This seems doable to me.
> It still feels like needless complexity to me,
Others have explained why this is a real problem.
> relabeling all of
> those libraries to have a new dependency field
The onward-dependency information for use by dpkg-shlibdeps wouldn't
be a control file field, I think. It would be elsewhere in bar's
source package, and end up as a dropping in libbar-dev.deb.
Ian.
