On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 04:45:22PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote: >On May 4 09:05, Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) wrote: >> At Tuesday, May 03, 2005 5:28 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote: >> > On May 3 21:49, Max Bowsher wrote: >> >> The other potential solution would be to attempt to uninstall the >> >> packages in dependency-sorted order, but that might get awkward in >> >> the case of circular dependencies. >> > >> > See my previous posting: Circular dependencies are bugs, right? >> > Creating a dependency tree and complaining about circular dependencies >> > in setup would be nice, though. >> > >> > Corinna >> >> As you pointed out earlier, circular dependencies can be considered bugs in >> the setup.hint files. Shouldn't they be caught and fixed when setup.ini is >> being made? Then setup/Brian, which/who has enough to do, wouldn't have to >> worry about it. > >In theory yes. It just won't hurt to have a dependency checker in setup >at one point, methinks.
I hate to disagree but I don't think circular dependencies are always bugs. For instance, it would not be inconceivable for gcc to rely on gcc-mingw since, for correct operation of gcc, gcc-mingw should be present. However, the same rationale could be made for gcc-mingw. It doesn't make any sense to just install gcc-mingw since it needs gcc to function so it could rely on gcc. cgf