To Require yelp or not to require yelp
Matej Cepl
mcepl at redhat.com
Sun Jun 10 20:38:28 UTC 2007
On 2007-06-10, 12:19 GMT, Jesse Keating wrote:
> How does yum/rpm know what functionality yelp provides to these
> packages? Do we then have to list in the Requires (and auto
> requires?!) what each required package does for a given
> package? Even if the user saw that this would remove yelp from
> all the packages, and he said yes anyway, how does that get
> yelp back for them in your firefox-32 scenario?
Well, the difference would be that there would be a big noise for
the system administrator, so he would know that something
significant is going on (major functionality of 96 packages
affected; just length of the list would make me think again).
And no, in my scenario they wouldn't know WHAT EXACTLY will
happen to them, just that some significant functionality of the
packages will be affected (because broken soft-dependency
Recommends:).
Actually, even what you seem to be suggesting was proposed in
Debian <http://tinyurl.com/2vmkrc> so than you would have in spec
file something like (quoting the Debian list post):
Package: mutt
Suggests: ispell [adds spell cheking while composing emails]
Suggests: urlview [extracts urls from email and can lanuch
a web browser]
Suggests: mixmaster [allows you to compose anonymized email]
Why not?
But note that this IS NOT what I suggested. My example would be:
Package: epiphany
Recommends: yelp
Then yum would know that when it removes yelp, some (unknown to
yum) functionality of epiphany package will be affected, and it
may ask system administrator something in the line of ``Are you
sure?'' question. And if confirmed (or if these Recommends:
confirmations would be switched off in /etc/yum.conf) then it
would just go ahead and remove yelp.
We cannot avoid stupid decisions (and we probably even shouldn't
try), but IMHO we could (and we should) try to avoid uninformed
decisions and we should follow the path of the least surprise --
when something significant is going to happen in the system, then
there should be a bang big enough for sysadmin to notice.
Does it make more sense?
Matej
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