Pulling Xorg dependencies on headless machine

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 01:46:31AM +0200, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> I don't know much about debian, but dmd itself doesn't need X, nor
> should phobos. I compile and run D programs on headless web servers
> every day.
> 
> If you can't ignore the dependencies with the apt, downloading the
> dmd zip file should be just about as easy and it doesn't pull
> anything else with it.

OK, I just checked the .deb from dlang.org. It has a dependency on
xdg-utils, which Recommends: x11-utils and x11-server-utils. That's the
culprit; installing x11-utils and x11-server-utils will pull in a
truckload of X11 stuff.

Running apt-get with --no-install-recommends should avoid the problem.

On that note, though, why on earth are we depending on xdg-utils? The
package description says:

 xdg-utils contains utilities for integrating applications with the
 desktop environment, regardless of which desktop environment is used.
 They are part of freedesktop.org's Portland project.

Why does DMD need desktop integration??

At most, xdg-utils should be a Recommends:, if not outright removed from
the dependency list. It doesn't belong in Depends:, for sure.


T

-- 
Guns don't kill people. Bullets do.