Shawn Walker wrote:
Peter Tribble wrote:
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Darren J
Moffat<[email protected]> wrote:
I think of two reasons why you would want to ignore dependencies:
1) time to install all the dependencies
2) space need to install all the dependencies
Are there others ?
3. The dependency information is plain wrong
4. You want package A but not package B that it depends on. (Or packages
C, D, E, F... that get pulled in.) Am I managing the system, or is
the system
managing me?
The software says that it needs B (or C, D, E, F) to run. It is the
responsibility of the package creator to correctly state dependencies.
This is a hypothetical situation of course. Can you name a specific
usage case where you have needed to do this that wasn't a *bug* in a
Sun package?
The problem is that dependencies are on a specific interface,
combination of interfaces, or subset of interfaces and the packaging
system declares them on something other than those interface. This
isn't unique to IPS.
As an example:
We build and deliver Sendmail (SUNWsndm). SUNWsndm delivers an
implementation of a program called /usr/lib/sendmail. There are
applications that require /usr/lib/sendmail. In my case, I can't use
the Sendmail that we deliver on opensolaris because my ISP requires me
to use functionality that wasn't built into our Sendmail. As a result,
I use an alternate build of Sendmail. In other cases, people may prefer
postfix, qmail, or some other MTA that also supplies it's own
/usr/lib/sendmail. If any of the applications that require
/usr/lib/sendmail to function had listed dependencies on SUNWsndm, folks
wanting to use another MTA would be SOL.
Similar situations arise for other interfaces and services that are or
can be provided.
5. The dependency graph become so dense and knotted that it's impossible
to make any changes. And, yes, I've seen this several times.
Which is exactly why we don't offer --no-deps and --force. If you
ignore dependencies and force operations, you might as well use
tarballs to install all of your software.
What's the point of using a packaging system if you're just going to
turn off all of the aspects that make it one?
I understand that replacing delivered functionality makes the system
"unsupportable" from a vendor perspective, but as a user, I may be
willing to trade support for Perl, Sendmail, ... on opensolaris for a
feature that I want or need from a replacement. In the absence of a
more complete method of describing dependencies, the ability to break
package dependencies during installation or removal makes it possible to
install and even update a system the way I may want it.
-Norm
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