From debian-devel  Fri Feb 23 09:03:17 2024
From: Sune Vuorela <nospam () vuorela ! dk>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:03:17 +0000
To: debian-devel
Subject: Re: Another take on package relationship substvars
Message-Id: <ur9n0l$url$1 () ciao ! gmane ! io>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=debian-devel&m=170867892506937

On 2024-02-23, Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> wrote:
> If it was to happen, I suspect that ${shlibs:Depends} would not be the 
> best argument. First off, dpkg-shlibdeps has infrastructure to 
> selectively demote scanned elf binaries to a different substvar. 
> Secondly, I struggle to think of a real world case, where demoting 
> ${shlibs:Depends} would matter a lot. That is, a case where the right 
> answer is not just splitting these binaries into a separate package if 
> they are that consuming in dependencies.

I have seen it as real life usecases where there is a main binary that
has plugins for integrations with <others>, and just having those
plugins work when the integration point is needed.

Usually though, they are using dpkg-shlibdeps to selectively demote
scanned elfs to a different substvar, given that the 'main binary' is
already a elf binary with some dependencies, so doing it with 'all of
them' is likely unlikely for that case.

For example:

dpkg-shlibdeps -Tdebian/dirmngr.substvars -dRecommends
debian/dirmngr/usr/lib/gnupg/dirmngr_ldap -dDepends
debian/dirmngr/usr/bin/dirmngr


http://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=-dRecommends&literal=1

http://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=-dSuggests&literal=1

/Sune