Excessive package interdependency

[Felipe Alfaro Solana]

On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 22:00, Thomas Hille wrote:

> I have one too: mc (midnight commander) needs XFree86-libs

This has been already explained: if you compile mc from its sources
(.src.rpm file) on a system which has XFree86-libs-devel installed,
during compilation, "mc" will detect a functional XFree86 development
environment and will enable additional extensions for running "mc" under
X (for example, using the mouse on a terminal window).

The only way to stop this is to recompile "mc" from its SRPM package on
a system which *has no* XFree86 development libraries and files
available. So, during compilation, "mc" won't detect those development
libraries and won't enable those extra dependencies.

If, for every imaginable package, the centralized Fedora build system
should starting installing/removing development packages before
compiling a package just to remove some dependencies, then the build
system would become a complete nightmare.

The best you can do is compile "mc" yourself. That's what I do whan a
package requires functionality I don't want/need/desire.