Inflation of explicit build requirements

Nicolas Mailhot Nicolas.Mailhot at laPoste.net
Sat Jun 5 11:34:55 UTC 2004


Le ven, 04/06/2004 à 20:53 +0200, Michael Schwendt a écrit :
> The appearance of explicit build requirements like 'gcc-c++', 'cpp' (!),
> 'perl' or even 'sed' in a couple of src.rpms indicates that there are
> different opinions on what packages are considered as belonging into a
> fundamental build environment.
> 
> I'm afraid that if this trend continues, packages will soon buildrequire
> 'make', 'findutils', 'gcc', 'gawk' and others. This kind of inflation of
> explicit build dependencies would be both insane and limiting. Limiting in
> that it enforces dependencies on fragile package names and specific
> compiler packages. 

The solution is pretty obvious - since the locations of most of these
binaries is specified by the LSB use /bin/sed instead of sed, etc. This
will work on any past, present or future lsb-compliand environment and
does not depend on fragile RedHat-specific package names.

I don't like any implicit dependencies dependencies on some form of
"core" always installed packages. It breaks between distributions, or
even between different generations of the same distribution.

This is what gave up in the past wonderful chains like "Gnome depends on
QT" or "SDL depends on KDE" by way of seemingly unnocious packages that
depended on one case on QT and another on arts because they happened to
be on the default install of the day so what could be wrong ?

Of course it broke on kickstarts and custom installs (back in the days
when anaconda did allow custom installations)

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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