Note that the main/universe distinction happens at the source package level,
so we'd have to have separate source packages, ideally with different upstream
tarballs. We could finesse that with two different source packages using the
same upstream tarball (as suggested in a previous follow up), but I think it
would be more difficult to get into Debian, thus precipitating a divergence.
Cheers,
-Barry
···
On Feb 11, 2011, at 05:18 PM, Jouni K. Seppänen wrote:
[Crossposting to matplotlib devel list]
Robert Kern <robert.kern@...149...> writes:
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 11:22, Barry Warsaw <barry@...147...> wrote:
Here's the problem: for Ubuntu, we've had to disable the building of
the numpy documentation package, because its dependencies violate
Ubuntu policy. Numpy is in our "main" archive but the documentation
depends on python-matplotlib, which lives in our "universe"
archive. Such cross archive dependencies break the build.We can't put python-matplotlib in main because of *its* dependencies.
As a digression, I think the python-matplotlib dependencies could be
significantly reduced. For a number of use cases (this is one of them,
but there are others), you don't need any GUI backend. Independent of
this issue, it would be great to be able to install python-matplotlib
in a headless server environment without pulling in all of those GUI
bits. Looking at the list of the hard dependencies, I don't understand
why half of them are there.Would it make sense to split out each interactive backend to its own
Ubuntu package, e.g. python-matplotlib-tk, etc? Each of these would
depend on the relevant toolkit packages, and python-matplotlib would
have a much shorter list of dependencies.