libc6 should not depend on findutils

[Gioele Barabucci]

libc6 should not depend on findutils.

The dependence has been added to solve bug #234345: during dist-upgrade, debconf could not be installed because it relied on xargs and xargs crashed because it had not been updated while libc6 had been.

Therefore, the dependence is not real and is just a work-around solution to that precise problem (already solved in a cleaner way by update-manager). Will other packages will be added to the dependence of libc6 when it will be discovered that they crash when installed along with a too-new libc6?

If apt had installed libc6 and fileutils/coreutils before installing debconf, and not debconf before xargs, that problem would had not show up.

[Gioele Barabucci (gioele)]

This bug is still present in Jaunty

[Gioele Barabucci (gioele)]

libc6 still depend on findutils on Karmic.

This was just a quick band-aid over bug #234345. Shouldn't it be removed by now?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This dependency must not be removed for at least the next six months. It
will be needed for direct upgrades from Hardy to Lucid (which will be
supported since Lucid will be an LTS release).

Since findutils is Essential, it really doesn't matter much. We would
not have added a less critical package to libc6's dependencies - we'd
have addressed it some other way. Essential packages tend to require
special handling.

 importance low