Dear Maintainer,

since v12 debhelper requires the use of misc:Pre-Depends. The manpage [1] says:

  [...]
  This change makes dh_installinit inject a misc:Pre-
  Depends for init-system-helpers (>= 1.54~). Please ensure
  that the package lists ${misc:Pre-Depends} in its Pre-
  Depends field before upgrading to compat 12.
  [...]

It seems to me this requirement is not honored well by recent debian packages.
A new check and tag debhelper-but-no-pre-depends should be introduced
therefore.

Regards,
Sven

[1] https://manpages.debian.org/buster/debhelper/debhelper.7.en.html

May I suggest instead that debhelper itself checks for this, and errors
out if Pre-Depends is missing?

That looks like the easy kind of check, and it's terribly easy to miss.
Also, it's only relevant for some of the packages running
dh_installinit, it would only be noise in the other majority of the
packages not using such helper.
Indeed, I'd suggest to debhelper to just start erroring out if they want
to add a substvars, but said substavar is missing in d/control.  Either
that, or hack it in dh_gencontrol, so it forcibly push the missing
fields with `dpkg-gencontrol -D` (this would also help clearing out the
"empty" 'Depends: ${misc:Depends}' a few packages have).

tags 944462 + moreinfo
thanks

Mattia Rizzolo wrote:

That would seem more sensible to me; thanks for the idea. Marking this
as moreinfo whilst we get clarification on this…


Regards,