packaging of gui app: should it require X + wm ?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 08:29:56 +1000, David Timms wrote:

> >> Just trying some minimal installs of the dev tree, succesfully booting
> >> to text mode (ie no X nor wm). I did a yum install gkrellm. This
> >> installed lm-sensors, but didn't force or warn that an X implmentation
> >> or window manager should be installed.
> > 
> > Did it pull in (or did you have installed before) xorg-x11-libs?
> > This is (usually) enough to get remote X going, you do not necessarily
> > need a WM or X on the machine itself.
> > 
> Thanks Ralf and Michael for the explanation. My minimal install did 
> already have:
>    libX11-1.0.3-4.fc6 installed. Is this the current name for what you 
> are referring to ?

Yes, and it is one of the dependencies of gkrellm.

> I found the following in the packaging guidelines-
> http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Requires :
> ===
> Requires
> 
> RPM has very good capabilities of automatically finding dependencies for 
> libraries and eg. Perl modules. In short, don't reinvent the wheel, but 
> just let rpm do its job. There is usually no need to explicitly list eg. 
> Requires: XFree86 when the dependency has already been picked up by rpm 
> in the form of depending on libraries in the XFree86 package.
> ===
> This tells me what not to do. I can't find what I should do (other than 
> to include/install a .desktop file 
> http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#desktop ) with 
> requires when I'm a packaging a gui app.

It _does_ tell you what to do. Quote: "just let rpm do its job".

When looking at "rpm --query --requires gkrellm" you will see the
automatically added dependencies on X11, GTK+ v2 and many other libraries.
It is built against stuff that depends on X11, and hence rpmbuild found
out about such dependencies automatically.

> For eg gkrellm includes: libSM-devel and not much else that would 
> indicate X: 
> http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rpms/gkrellm/devel/gkrellm.spec?root=extras&view=markup
>

gtk2-devel

> Perhaps it is part of the {invisible} list of packages that I shouldn't 
> require ?  Also, I was unable to find the list of packages that are in 
> the newer mock base build - any pointer to such a list ?

Can't answer that since I find it difficult to navigate in the Fedora
Extras Wiki pages.