Dependency loops considered harmful?

[Chris Snook]

Jon Ciesla wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've noticed that we have quite a lot of dependency loops in
>> repositories. The current i386 rawhide has 354 packages which are part
>> of one or more loops.
>>
>> Is that ok? I've always thought it's something that should be avoided
>> as it makes life harder for rpm, yum and users trying to manually
>> install or remove rpms. I even remember few incidents where a loop
>> caused serious troubles when installing packages with scriptlets.
>>
>> Full list of the packages is here:
>> http://fedorapeople.org/~mlichvar/tmp/rawhide.i386.loops
>>
>> For example, why games data depend on binaries?
> 
> So that if we try to upgrade the version of the binaries and not the data,
> it will fail. We can still bump the release in most cases, allowing for
> minot fixes without requiring the user to download the same data again.

It sounds like people are using Requires: foo >= X where they should be using 
Conflicts: foo < X.  There's no harm done if you install a game data file and 
the game isn't installed.  Please don't create dependency loops.

-- Chris