Bug#1023331: pass: Needs wl-copy but there is no "Depends:"

[Ralf Jung]

Package: pass
Version: 1.7.4-5
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

when being run under Wayland, pass uses 'wl-copy' to copy things to the clipboard.
This leads to the following error on my system:

/usr/bin/pass: line 180: wl-copy: command not found

An "apt install wl-clipboard" fixes that. Looks like a missing dependency?

Kinds regards,
Ralf

-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (100, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 6.0.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_USER
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages pass depends on:
ii gnupg 2.2.40-1
ii tree 2.0.4-1

Versions of packages pass recommends:
ii git 1:2.35.1-1
ii qrencode 4.1.1-1
ii wl-clipboard 2.1.0-0.1+b1
ii xclip 0.13-2

Versions of packages pass suggests:
ii libxml-simple-perl 2.25-1
ii perl 5.36.0-4
pn python <none>
ii python3 3.10.6-1
ii ruby 1:3.0+3.1

-- no debconf information

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2022 at 02:27:24PM +0100, Ralf Jung wrote:
> when being run under Wayland, pass uses 'wl-copy' to copy things to the clipboard.
> This leads to the following error on my system:
>
> /usr/bin/pass: line 180: wl-copy: command not found
>
> An "apt install wl-clipboard" fixes that. Looks like a missing dependency?

There's already a Recommends on "xclip | wl-clipboard", attempting to
express the fact that (a) only some pass functionality uses either
utility and pass is otherwise usable without it (I don't use the
clipboard functionality myself), and (b) pass uses one or the other
depending on whether you're using X or Wayland. I certainly don't think
a Depends is necessary here, but you evidently missed the Recommends as
well.

It's not entirely clear how to improve this without annoying some
constituencies of pass users with excess dependencies. Maybe if it were
"Recommends: xclip, wl-clipboard" instead then it would be less likely
that people would miss the wl-clipboard recommendation?

--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwa...@debian.org]

[Ralf Jung]

Hi,

>> An "apt install wl-clipboard" fixes that. Looks like a missing dependency?
>
> There's already a Recommends on "xclip | wl-clipboard", attempting to
> express the fact that (a) only some pass functionality uses either
> utility and pass is otherwise usable without it (I don't use the
> clipboard functionality myself), and (b) pass uses one or the other
> depending on whether you're using X or Wayland. I certainly don't think
> a Depends is necessary here, but you evidently missed the Recommends as
> well.

The recommends is satisfied because I have xclip installed. The "|" doesn't
really help when one switches from X11 to wayland (which means one still has all
the X11 things installed).
In fact I assume most wayland users will have X11 installed, and the xclip
alternative comes first here, so it is probably rather rare that this would
actually end up installing wl-clipboard.

> It's not entirely clear how to improve this without annoying some
> constituencies of pass users with excess dependencies. Maybe if it were
> "Recommends: xclip, wl-clipboard" instead then it would be less likely
> that people would miss the wl-clipboard recommendation?

Yeah it's not clear what the best solution is here... ideally you'd be able to
say "if some wayland compositor is installed, also recommend wl-clipboard", but
that is not something dpkg can express.

wl-clipboard has very few dependencies though -- libwayland-client0 is already a
dependency of libgtk3 and libgtk4 and plasma-desktop. So yeah I think
"Recommends: wl-clipboard" would probably make sense.

; Ralf