Excessive package interdependency

[Peter Jones]

On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 11:11, Aurelien Bompard wrote:
> > Packages should be built to incorporate other software if it exists, but
> > install and run happily even when all the extras aren't there. A
> > dependency means "it needs," not "it can use."
> 
> Another community-driven distribution has "Recommands: " and "Suggests: "
> for this purpose...
> Any chance to see this one day in rpm ? (and of course, be handeled by yum,
> apt, s-c-packages, synaptic, whatever...)
> Two instructions are maybe too much, but one may be nice.
> 
> What do you think about that ? Way too much work ?

This is one way to do it, there are some others which are less invasive
to the package manager itself.

Right now, though, the mechanism for expressing that you can get more
functionality out of packageA by installing packageB is probably not the
biggest concern.

For very many of the places where this annoys people, what they're
seeing is this:

  1) packageA is installed
  2) packageB is built
   a) packageB's configure script notices that packageA is
       installed and decides to conditionally include some code
   b) packageB acquires a dependency on packageA.

What you're hoping for instead is packageB requiring packageA to build,
and then having code that executes at *runtime* to test for the
existence of packageA, and then include the optional features.

All the warm fuzzy "wouldn't it be nice" conversation in the world isn't
going to change that.  If you want to seriously impact this what needs
to be done first is for the software to be changed so that the
conditional inclusion happens at runtime instead of during the build.

So the answer is to write some code, and get whatever software you think
should be packaged better to actually *support* what you're trying to
do.  Let's wait to worry about how it's packaged until the packaging
will make a difference.

As for if this is actually worth or not, well, there's still some debate
to be had on that, I think.

-- 
        Peter

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.