A plan to get rid of unnecessary package dependencies

As Steve Langasek detailed in his d-d-a mail[1], unnecessary
dependencies cause lots of problems, as they make transitions
bigger then they need to be.

The root cause are unnecessary libraries on the linker commandline,
which get stored in the resulting binary and which dpkg-shlibdeps
happily turns into inter-package dependencies.

Thus the goal is to eliminate those unnecessary linker arguments.

As a start, I've written a script that searches for unnecessary
dependencies and reports them. Results are available here:
http://rerun.lefant.net/checklib

More detailed information about the meaning of the results are
available on the web page, the two most important points are
"problems" and "errors".

A "problem" means that the package has useless dependencies on
library packages. This causes the kind of trouble outlined above and
should be fixed. A HOWTO is here:
http://rerun.lefant.net/checklib/howto-fix-problems.html


The other, even more important issue, are checklib "errors". They
indicate that the package check failed. That's usually caused by
deps on non-existing packages or missing dependencies.  Both are (at
least) important bugs in the package!

A summary of the possible causes for errors and some hints for
fixing them are here:
http://rerun.lefant.net/checklib/howto-fix-errors.html

Below is the dd-list output of packages which are missing
dependencies, and where this can cause real problems (i.e. the
package can be installed without pulling in all the necessary
library packages). All the packages listed below have (not yet filed) serious
bugs. If one of your packages is affected please fix it ASAP.

Please take a look at the results for packages you are involved in,
and try to fix the issues if you see "problems" or "errors".

Cheers,
Christian Aichinger

[1]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/11/msg...

Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org>
   lush

Jay Bonci <jaybonci@debian.org>
   libxml-libxml-common-perl

Marco Cabizza <marco87@gmail.com>
   libgnome-media0

Debian Hebrew Packaging Team <debian-hebrew-package@lists.alioth.debian.org>
   libhdate-perl
   libhdate-python
   libhocr-perl
   libhocr-python

Debian Java Maintainers <pkg-java-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
   eclipse-jdt-gcj
   eclipse-pde-gcj
   eclipse-platform-gcj
   eclipse-rcp-gcj

Patrick Dreker <patrick@dreker.org>
   python-pyxmpp

Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>
   r-cran-fmultivar
   r-cran-fseries

Peter Van Eynde <pvaneynd@debian.org>
   cmucl-clm

Gustavo Franco <stratus@debian.org>
   python-notify

David Moreno Garza <damog@debian.org>
   rxvt

Debian QA Group <packages@qa.debian.org>
   rxvt-beta
   socketapi1

Christoph Haas <haas@debian.org>
   fyre

Dafydd Harries <daf@debian.org>
   libjinglebase0.3-0
   libjinglep2p0.3-0
   libjinglesession0.3-0
   libjinglexmllite0.3-0
   libjinglexmpp0.3-0

Nobuhiro Iwamatsu <hemamu@t-base.ne.jp>
   libflash-mozplugin
   libflash-swfplayer

Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org>
   python-pygresql
   tix

Carlos Laviola <claviola@debian.org>
   fp-ide

Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org>
   r-cran-bayesm

Ricardo Javier Cardenes Medina <rcardenes@debian.org>
   python-kde3

Vittorio Palmisano <redclay81@gmail.com>
   python-matplotlib

Michael Piefel <piefel@debian.org>
   python-magic

Doug Rintoul <doug_rintoul@sil.org>
   kmflcomp

Kevin M. Rosenberg <kmr@debian.org>
   ctsim
   ctsim-athlon
   ctsim-pentium4

Anibal Monsalve Salazar <anibal@debian.org>
   libgii1-target-x

Joop Stakenborg <pa3aba@debian.org>
   libhamlib2

William Vera <billy@billy.com.mx>
   gsetroot