Dependency loops considered harmful?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:23:11 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:

> > That works for a Mom and Pop desktop but doesn't work as a developer's
> > workstation.  When developing software you might need a library that
> > does Foo.  Look on the system, hey, I can use libFoo!  A few weeks
> > later, when you remove Gnome-Foo from your system because your shiny new
> >  application does the job,
> 
> Why would you do such a thing?

Because developers build their app from local working-directories (or
check-outs from source code management systems) and run the software from
the same private path or install into /usr/local for testing. It's not
unusual to install without using RPM.

They would need a way to lock required packages, so the optional
libfoo is never removed together with the request to uninstall the
last app that depends on it.

Even not touching -devel packages and all their dependencies upon
package removal would not guarantee that something which is required
by the developer is removed.

The possibility to undo single transactions (but only the *new* pkgs
a transaction added to the system) would be nice.