You are portraying software as either "broken" or "working" as a black
and white issue,
and I don't think it's black and white. I don't think it's obvious that
every single file in
a package must be "functional" as decided by the IPS automatic
dependency checker.
As another example, the NetBeans packages deliver small utility binaries
for a number of platforms
bundled into one large product that has identical bits across multiple
platforms. Presumably, you would
say that they shouldn't be doing that, since the dynamic linker for
Linux is not present in OpenSolaris.
There is also a larger philosophical issue about how draconian to be
with regards to automatically
detected dependencies. I can see that you are pretty far towards the
strict side of the spectrum. I
would be much further towards the loose/audit side of things. I am only
asking that we back off a little
more towards the middle of the spectrum on this issue. For example, we
could support explicit
dependency overrides that could be put in manually only when a specific
dependency was deemed to
be unnecessary by the package maintainer.
--chris
Brock Pytlik wrote:
I think to some extent, this is a philosophical issue, what it means
for a package to "work" or "be complete." While I see your point about
the frustration or inefficiency of having to add a dependency on perl
in that case, I also see the point of view that if we install a
package, everything in that package should have all its dependencies
met. In the case you outline above, I would suggest that the right
thing to do would be to break the demo pieces out into a separate
package(s) which had additional dependencies. As an end user, if I
install X, I think I have the right to expect everything in that
package to "just work."
I'm don't agree with allowing an override of the auto dependencies. I
could be wrong, by my expectation would be that while we might have a
large number of false negatives (missed dependencies) the number of
false positives would be small (given the expectation I outlined
above). I'm not sure why the release repo would want a different audit
policy than the contrib repo in any case. I tend to be of the opinion
that we shouldn't deliver software we know to be partially broken in
terms of dependencies.
Brock
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