[Bug 187294] Review Request: gwyddion

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Summary: Review Request: gwyddion


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=187294





------- Additional Comments From yeti at physics.muni.cz  2006-09-11 17:29 EST -------
Spec URI: http://gwyddion.net/download/test/gwyddion.spec
SRPM URI: http://gwyddion.net/download/test/gwyddion-1.99.9-4.src.rpm

* Mon Sep 11 2006 David Necas (Yeti) <yeti at physics.muni.cz> - 1.99.9-4
- Split plug-ins from devel to plugin-examples
- Added gwyddion-1-99-9-crashes.patch fixing several crashes (from upstream)

And now to the dependency issue.  I'm afraid it's all upside down.

A perl module *extends* the interpreter, it does not *use* it.

A Perl module alone is equally useless with or without the interpreter, the only
useful thing is something that uses both the interpreter and the module, i.e., a
program.

If you do not accept `I want to write perl programs/run 3rd party perl programs
but don't have the perl interpreter' as a packaging problem (such a `problem'
could be only `solved' by mandatory installation of every piece of software in
the Universe), no case when depencencies are unmet can arise.  And when no such
case can arise, where is the dependency?

For comparison with an area where things still work logically: how many -devel
packages require gcc?  I will save you counting: Zero. None. Nada. Not a single one.

Why is it so?  Because they do not really require gcc, they only provide
extensions, although one needs gcc to use them in programs (or not to use, one
needs gcc to compile stuff no matter he uses the extension or not).

So the module -> interpreter dependency is not a hard dependency, but it still
has a reason.  It is a convenience dependency.  We expect someone installing a
perl module does it because

(a) he installs it to fulfill requirements of a perl script, and the dependency
is redundant then but does not harm, or

(b) he wants to write perl scripts using this module, and here we save him some
 work -- of course, if he wishes to write scripts that do not use any module he
still has to install perl himself but that's just it.

Case (a) occurs when one installs gwyddion-plugin-examples (remember the
dependency is a harmless redundancy here), case (b) does *not* occur because the
module is not meant to be publicly used.

[discursion]
To see how far the expectation-based dependencies got from the real world, look
at the `-devel requires pkgconfig' above.  The dependency stated by the policy
is actually nonsense, one can compile programs using the library without
pkgconfig just fine (only with more manual work, and certain people will frown
upon you, etc.).  The real dependency is that a program whose configure script
uses pkgconfig requires pkgconfig to build.
[/discursion]

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