comps discussion at fudcon and the future

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

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?

CU
knurd


(¹) audacious, gstreamer, qmmp, k3b and some others could benefit from 
this, too

(²) or has somebody a better idea? A yum plugin? A daemon running in the 
background?