On 4/23/19 5:12 AM, Michael Biebl wrote:
My main concern is to keep the rsyslog core package reasonably small (dependency wise).
If you check <https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#binary-dependencies-depends-recommends-suggests-enhances-pre-depends>, note that a Depends is only required if "the depended-on package is required for the depending package to provide a significant amount of functionality". That, taken together with the tools typically installing Recommends by default, means you can make the libraries Recommends, not Depends. Or maybe even as Suggests.
Ideally, rsyslog would give a nice error if it fails to load a plugin due to a missing shared library, but even without that you can just mention needing to install Recommends and/or Suggests to use various optional plugins in the package extended description, README.Debian, etc.
(Of course, this does make the packaging a bit more complicated, since you'll need to add some -d options to your dpkg-shlibdeps call. Probably easier than even more extra packages, though.)
