Pulling Xorg dependencies on headless machine

Jordi Sayol g.sayol at yahoo.es
Sat Jul 27 21:19:26 PDT 2013


On 28/07/13 02:04, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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.
> 

As Vladimir Panteleev said, dman utility needs xdg-utils installed to run.

I think that moving xdg-utils from Depends: to Recommends: will worsen the problem.

xdg-utils has not Depends: packages, only Recommends: and Suggests:

Recommends: libfile-mimeinfo-perl, libnet-dbus-perl, libx11-protocol-perl, x11-utils, x11-xserver-utils
Suggests: gvfs-bin

So, if we move xdg-utils to Recommends:, and the system is set to install the Recommends: packages, the behavior will not change at all, but in a system that is not set to install Recommends: packages, dman should not work.

Regards,
-- 
Jordi Sayol


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