On Sat, 26 Sep 2026 at 12:41:59 +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 03:37:59PM +0200, Niels Thykier wrote:
This is a likely a consequence of relationship substvars. Which ever tool
adds those dependencies (I do not know which it is, but likely `sphinxdoc`
since it is the only add-on sequence I noticed in devref) will need to
evaluate how to handle the case where these should not be hard dependencies.
i'm confused, d/control has this:
Depends: ${misc:Depends}
Recommends: debian-policy,
sensible-utils,
${sphinxdoc:Depends},
why is this turned into a depends?
debhelper compat level 14 automatically takes all substvars named like
foo:Depends (etc.) and adds them to Depends (etc.), without them needing
to be explicitly listed in d/control. See
debhelper-compat-upgrade-checklist(7) for full details.
To take something that is normally a Depends and downgrade it to a
Recommends, you'd need either a new feature in dh_sphinxdoc giving it an
option to generate a sphinxdoc:Recommends substvar instead (analogous to
the way that dpkg-shlibdeps -dRecommends generates shlibs:Recommends),
or to go back to compat level 13 (as you've done).
smcv
