comps discussion at fudcon and the future

[seth vidal]

On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 09:48 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> 
> > On 16.01.2009 07:34, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> >> On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> >>> seth vidal wrote:
> >>> 
> >>>> Really? Who is making the plans for soft deps. Doesn't seem like it at
> >>>> the rpm layer.
> >>> Last I checked it was on the rpm.org todo list. Maybe it got dropped. That
> >>> would be unfortunate, because I think they could be useful, I've seen
> >>> several cases where they would have helped (just one example: Kile (a 
> >>> LaTeX
> >>> editor) can call many tools, most users will want them dragged in, but 
> >>> some
> >>> don't and Kile will still work, with reduced functionality, without them -
> >>> just grep for Requires(hint) in packages (mostly those touched by Rex
> >>> Dieter) to see more places where we'd like soft dependencies) and Debian
> >>> fans keep making fun of us because we don't have them ;-).
> >> It hasn't been dropped, only post-poned until we figure out a bunch of 
> >> details.
> >
> > I don't want to get tracked into the discussions if "Requires(hint)" and 
> > other soft deps make sense to support in rpm/yum or not.
> >
> > But if conditionals really go away in comps it would be really nice for 
> > external repos like RPM Fusion to have a alternative way to automatically get 
> > (for example(¹) ) xine-lib-extras-freeworld installed if the users installs 
> > (or already has installed) xine-lib.
> >
> > Something like that is afaics needed to make things "just work" (²) -- and 
> > that's what we all want, isn't it?
> 
> Yup, I remember sorely missing the ability to do this in "former life".
> 
> This is the "enhances" use-case, which is why it typically gets bundled up 
> with soft-dependencies. Only it's got relatively little to do with the 
> elasticity of a dependency, this would be a reverse dependency (whether 
> it's soft or not is another issue), which is a completely new dependency 
> class and the reason "enhances" is such a platypus.

And it means we have to cope with stupidity like:
Enhances: glibc

which pulls in the pkg for EVERYONE.

-sv