Breaking deps deliberately

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 01:37:48AM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 03:28:53PM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> >> Do any other distributions purposefully add broken dependencies to their
> >> repositories (So that you wouldn't be able to install it without
> >> pointing at a second source for a package)?
> > 
> > Debian allows them, 
> Where is the documentation of this policy?  because...
> 
> > and they have a special program called 'equivs'
> > which you can use to locally compile packages in order to satisfy such
> > broken dependencies:
> > 
> > http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-helpers.en.html
> > 
> This just explains how the equivs command works and how a user can use
> it if they've installed a piece of software from outside the packaging
> system and then want to list it as being available to the package manager.

This is getting a bit off-topic, but anyhow ...

The Debian Reference Manual suggests using equivs:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-package.en.html#s-apt-trouble

The Debian Policy Manual contains explicit rules about broken
dependencies here:

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-sections

As you can see, in Debian's main repository they explicitly disallow
broken deps for certain types of deps, but Debian has quite a complex
dependency system, so this doesn't apply for things like "Suggests"
and "Enhances".  BTW "Recommends" was added to the above list in
Debian Lenny - previous releases of Debian allowed main packages to
Recommend packages outside main.

Anyway, I think my point is not that we should care about what Debian
does, but that we should make what is and isn't allowed explicit in
the Fedora packaging guidelines.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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