Fedora Feature Proposal: Yum Integration

Jeroen van Meeuwen kanarip at kanarip.com
Thu Jul 19 11:02:25 UTC 2007


Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip <at> kanarip.com> writes:
>> Half broken apps because of missing dependencies that are needed for
>> "extra features" rather then "core functionality" is just bad
>> programming/app design.
> 
> But missing those "extra features" is exactly what I call "half broken".
> 

Aha, I thought the 'broken' part implied buttons that do not respond and
options that are in the --usage/--help but don't do anything (and the
like) ;-)

> I think soft dependencies are a much more admin-friendly way to handle this. 
> Rex Dieter is working on a proposal there:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RexDieter/SoftDependencies

+1

> It'd also have the advantage of not locking users into the 
> yum/pirut/system-install-packages framework if they wish to use apt-rpm or 
> smart instead.
> 

Whatever other application a (super)user may install does not limit the
features we could add to whatever we choose to be a system's default.
apt-rpm and smart in this case would just not happily do soft deps. No
big deal. And if they do, they may have no policy option. Again, no big
deal.

> And IMHO even a hard dependency is a better approach than a post-install 
> prompt. Disk space is cheap.
> 

True, disk space is cheap, and for some parts of the world, that applies
to bandwidth too. I also have to agree on that, under certain
circumstances, hard deps are better. However that isn't mutually
exclusive with soft deps.

If soft deps for a package are 'listed' (in RPMDB?) and some file from
the package requests a soft dep to be installed I presume a superuser
could set something like a policy which allows or disallows the
automated installation of the soft dep, without requiring the user to
gain superuser privileges. That same policy could include 'follow',
'ask' or 'ignore' so that when the admin yum installs foo soft depending
on bar, it could either automagically follow, ask or ignore.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip




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