[Bug 40842] Missing dependencies

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40842

--- Comment #6 from Sebastian Lackner <sebastian at fds-team.de> ---
(In reply to sworddragon2 from comment #5)
> I'm using a minimalistic system and have disabled at default the
> installation of recommended packages in apt. Also I think this topic can be
> extended to more packages as for example if libxcursor1 is missing mouse
> cursors are not being rendered correctly and if libxi6 is missing raw input
> does not work.

For people trying to run Wine on a minimal system (for example with limited
disk space), the overhead of installing a lot of additional packages is
probably not acceptable - especially when they are not required for the
applications they would like to run. By adding such packages as recommendation
instead of fixed dependency we leave the choice to the user, which would not be
possible otherwise.

Also please note that the installation instructions on
https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu suggests the following line for installing the
package, which should effectively treat all recommendations as dependencies:

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel

> 
> Some reasons why I think a reconsideration what should be a dependency and
> what should be a recommendation is needed:
> 
> - Ubuntu installs at default recommended packages so in this case it would
> not make an effective difference if the packages would be a dependency or a
> recommendation. But the few users that do not install recommended packages
> at default will notice earlier or later issues on normal usage.

When they use the commandline mentioned on the Wiki it should still work, no?

> - From the debian policy about Depends: "The Depends field should be used if
> the depended-on package is required for the depending package to provide a
> significant amount of functionality.". Sine Wine provides the Windows API
> for non-Windows systems a working mouse and working PNG-support are in my
> opinion indeed significant.

I guess it really depends on the use-case. For someone who wants to run console
applications only, the lack of those components might be harmless. Although
Windows applications might probably not behave as expected, for Wine itself its
absolutely fine when such dependencies are missing. Wine is not statically
linked against them, and they are loaded at runtime when required.

> - Even if the installaion of recommended packages is not disabled apt does
> not always guarantee that they are getting installed. I have reported this
> already here ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/1571363 )
> but it is not known if this is intended or just a bug. At least this is how
> apt handles this now for several years or even more. The 3 packages used as
> example here are also affected by this behavior and may not get installed
> even on executing "apt-get install winehq-devel --install-recommends". How
> much this affects a real system may depend how long the installation
> exists/how often the package state got changed. Over time systems might end
> up with the one or other recommended package missing causing eventually the
> user to notice an issue and creating a bogus report.

I'm not sure why the command does not work for you although the packages are
available, this should not be the case. If the packages are not available
however, it is intentional that they are skipped instead of failing the
installation. In most cases (for example, trouble with installing a rarely used
component) this is better than being too strict.

To sum it up, although I agree that changing some of the recommendations to a
fixed dependency might have some advantages, I am not sure if we should add
"unnecessary" restrictions, which might block a user from using the package. @
Michael: What do you think?

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