[Fedora-packaging] Re: Are circular dependencies ok?

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 02:13:55PM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Stepan Kasal wrote:
> > First, "perl" and "perl-libs" require each other; this is a usual
> > solution of the multilib problem
> <tangent>
> I've never understand why one would ever split packages, but them depend
> on each other.  What's the point?  What advantage does that have over
> simply having the contents of both (sub)packages in a single package?
> </tangent>

with foo and foo-libs, foo-libs can be declared multilib.
So it is possible that on x86_64 both foo-libs.i386 and
foo-libs.x86_64 are installed.

If both formed one package "foo" and the usage of the libraries in
both 32bit and 64bit variant were required, then the package foo
would have to be declared as multilib.

The files which are outside {/usr,}/lib{,64} may cause a collision.
For ELF files, rpm selects one of the two, but all other collisions
have to be resolved: every generated file has to be snitized, so that
it is identical for both architectures.

That might be very tedious, and thus the split.

Hope this explains it,
	Stepan Kasal