Package runtime dependencies (see bug#38576)

[Lars-Dominik Braun <ldb@leibniz-psychology.org>]

Hi,

in light of bug#38576 I filed, I’d like to get some guidance on when to pull in
dependencies. The package in question is r-irkernel, which is essentially an R
package bridging between Jupyter and R. However, it would never be “imported”
by the user like other R packages. Instead Jupyter executes R and tells it to
run an IPC server written in R. Thus I would consider r-minimal a runtime
dependency of r-irkernel. (If r-minimal is not installed then R_LIBS_SITE is
not set and R can’t find the package IRkernel whenever Jupyter tries to run R
code.)

python-ipykernel however does *not* explicitcy depend on python, even though it
works exactly the same, whereas jupyter-guile-kernel depends on guile.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Lars