On 21/01/11 22:38, Xyne wrote:
If everyone were to use implicit dependencies then pacman would fail because no
package would specify the required dependency. A rule that would break the
system if it were followed by everyone is a bad rule. Expecting some to follow
it and others not to and just hoping that everyone will keep working is
simply bad practice. It's not minimalist... it's just lazy.
I pointed out that hard rules are not good. e.g. coreutils should (and
does) depend on glibc as it is not guaranteed that glibc is installed at
the time when you first install coreutils (which is likely the initial
install). But there is no point putting glibc in the depends list for
(e.g.) openoffice-base as it will be installed by that stage.
Two points to consider:
1) How much more complicated would it be to list all dependencies?
> readelf -d $(pacman -Qql openoffice-base) 2>/dev/null | grep NEEDED |
sort | uniq | wc -l
150
That is a lot of libraries... although some will be in the same package
so that is an upper estimate. But that is only libraries and the
complete dep list will be longer than that.
2) It is worth the effort? We have very few bug reports about missing
dependencies and most (all?) of those fall into the category of missed
soname bumps or due to people not building in chroots. I.e. these are
because of poor packaging and not because we make assumptions about what
packages are installed or the dependencies of dependencies.
So I see making a change to the current approach as making things (1)
more complicated for (2) no real benefit.
Allan
