RPM Soft dependencies (Was: Re: Agenda for the 2009-05-26 Packaging Committee meeting)

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 22:34 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On 05/30/2009 10:23 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > One obvious one I maintain for Mandriva is Elisa (which just got renamed
> > to Moovida). If certain other packages are involved, it gains very
> > useful features...but it works perfectly well without them, and some
> > users may not want those features. A soft dependency covers this
> > situation pretty perfectly; by default you get the extra dependencies
> > installed so the features will be available, but if you're someone who
> > needs to optimize disk space or number of installed packages you'll have
> > configured urpmi not to install soft dependencies so you won't get them,
> > and if you didn't do that but you later decide to remove one of the soft
> > deps, you can. 
> 
> What is the behaviour when a package with soft deps on another package
> is upgraded and the soft dependency is currently not installed?

What is it, in MDV and SUSE? Can't remember, off the top of my head.
What should it be? Interesting question, indeed. Either option is wrong
for someone.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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