dependency champion?

[Henk Breimer]

On Thu, 6 Nov 2008 17:00:02 +0100
Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 6 Nov 2008 15:03:20 +0100, Henk Breimer wrote:
> 
> > [net at pietro ~]$ yum remove libthai
> 
> > Remove     266 Package(s)         
> > 
> > Is this ok [y/N]: 
> > no, of course.
> > Remaining question: is this the way 'requires' should be used?
> 
> You show that you don't understand the reason for this. This is a
> shared library that is linked with another system library: Pango. It
> results in an automatic 'Requires' on the libthai library SONAME in
> the pango package, since the library is required at run-time and
> isn't optional.
> 
> $ repoquery --whatrequires libthai.so.0
> libthai-0:0.1.9-4.fc9.i386
> pango-0:1.20.4-1.fc9.i386
> libthai-devel-0:0.1.9-4.fc9.i386
> scim-thai-0:0.1.1-2.fc9.i386
> pango-0:1.20.1-1.fc9.i386
> 
> Pango in turn is required by many a dozen packages. Removing Pango
> creates a long dependency chain of packages that would need to be
> removed, too.
> 
> In case you want to remove a system library like LibThai, you would
> need to disable it in Pango -- or rewrite Pango to load the library
> as an optional plugin (that's likely harder).
> 
> -- 
I fully understand what caused this.

My next question would be : "what would happen if such a helper program
for every small lanquage were included in the same way?"

A better solution is needed for this kind of things.

Henk