Ubuntu
couchdb package

CouchDB in Karmic should not have dependencies on X stuff

Bug #418762 reported by Joshua Timberman
10
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
couchdb (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Elliot Murphy

Bug Description

The CouchDB package in Karmic depends on:

Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.6-6~), libcurl3 (>= 7.16.2-1), libicu40 (>= 4.0-1), erlang-base (>= 1:13.b.1-dfsg) | erlang-base-hipe (>= 1:13.b.1-dfsg), erlang-crypto (>= 1:13.b.1-dfsg), erlang-inets (>= 1:13.b.1-dfsg), erlang-xmerl (>= 1:13.b.1-dfsg), erlang-abi-13.a, adduser, libjs-jquery, lsb-base, xulrunner-1.9

Whereas in Jaunty:

Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.6-6~), libicu38 (>= 3.8-5), libmozjs0d (>= 1.8.1.5), erlang-abi-11.b.3, erlang-nox (>= 1:12.b.3-dfsg), adduser, lsb-base, mime-support

On Karmic, this results in installing a lot of extra packages to support the X11 tools for Erlang. This is undesirable on server installs (common place for CouchDB).

arky (arky)
affects: ubuntu → couchdb (Ubuntu)
Revision history for this message
Elliot Murphy (statik) wrote :

interesting! the dependency changes were made to reduce the size of the deps, not to increase them. i will look at this to see what is dragging in X, that should not be happening.

Changed in couchdb (Ubuntu):
assignee: nobody → Elliot Murphy (statik)
Revision history for this message
Elliot Murphy (statik) wrote :

I've changed the summary of the bug because reverting to depending on erlang-nox would inflate the dependency chain for the desktop.

summary: - CouchDB in Karmic should depend on erlang-nox
+ CouchDB in Karmic should not have dependencies on X stuff
Jonathan Davies (jpds)
Changed in couchdb (Ubuntu):
status: New → Won't Fix
status: Won't Fix → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Joshua Timberman (jtimberman) wrote :

The main culprit is 'xulrunner', which isn't actually needed by CouchDB itself. Whatever is using CouchDB that wants to make use of xulrunner should depend on xulrunner directly.

Revision history for this message
Stuart Langridge (sil) wrote :

We depend on xulrunner because CouchDB requires spidermonkey, the Mozilla JavaScript engine.

Revision history for this message
Joshua Timberman (jtimberman) wrote :

I guess I'm confused why xulrunner is required if the actual dependency is on spidermonkey (libmozjs0d?). CouchDB doesn't require xulrunner itself, just spidermonkey. I see the libmozjs0d package's source is xulrunner, but why make the extra dependency?

The reason for my concern here is for Lucid, an LTS that will likely be installed on a lot of servers, and CouchDB is making a good name for itself as a server storage backend, especially for projects like Chef. By requiring xulrunner in the package, a lot of X11 packages are pulled in which is undesirable on servers (for lean installations, especially virtual systems, and for security concerns).

Revision history for this message
Damjan Georgievski (gdamjan) wrote :

Isn't the sollution here for CouchDB to depend on "seamonkey" and both xulrunner and libmozjs0d to provide "seamonkey" ?

Revision history for this message
Joshua Timberman (jtimberman) wrote :

Seamonkey is a metapackage that depends on seamonkey-browser and seamonkey-mailnews, which end up pulling in the X11 dependencies.

What part of Ubuntu using CouchDB actually uses xulrunner? Why can't *that* require xulrunner, and CouchDB require libmozjs0d?

Revision history for this message
Alexander Sack (asac) wrote :

FYI, read bug 286906 and the linked upstream bug there.

Revision history for this message
Stuart Langridge (sil) wrote :

Marking as a duplicate of bug #286906.

Revision history for this message
Joshua Timberman (jtimberman) wrote :

This is *not* a duplicate of the other bug.

The bug here is that CouchDB depends on xulrunner, which has dependencies on X11 libraries, which can be very undesirable on server installations, especially by people who don't want software they will never use installed.

Revision history for this message
Stuart Langridge (sil) wrote :

I marked it as a duplicate because I am told that libmozjs0d should not exist as a separate library because no API/ABI guarantees are provided; that's why it's part of xulrunner. See discussion in the other bug.

Revision history for this message
Joshua Timberman (jtimberman) wrote :

Okay, I added my commentary on that ticket then.

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