Subject: Re: bug#877: diffoscope: Installing diffoscope suggests installing systemd

From: Mark Hindley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:57:30 +0000

Alejandro,

Thanks for this.

As has already been mentioned, Devuan doesn't fork diffoscope and uses Debian's
packages directly without recompilation. This explains why the recommendation is
still present. Of course systemd itself is not available in Devuan[1], so apt
simply ignores the recommendation for an unavailable package.

Forking diffoscope (and the on-going maintenance that incurs) just to remove
this sort of cruft is not a useful use of our limited resources IMO.

If you can find breakage caused by the Recommends, please feel free to reopen
and provide details.

Mark

[1]  https://pkginfo.devuan.org/cgi-bin/policy-query.html??c=package&q=systemd