[Fedora-packaging] Requires(missingok)

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 09:28:41AM +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> seth vidal wrote:
>> On Sun, 2008-03-02 at 16:35 -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>> I saw a review ticket for a package which uses Requires(missingok):
>>> which I have not seen before.  Some searching turned up the kismet and
>>> python-docutils which currently use this idiom.
>>>
>>> What is this actually supposed to do?  I can understand what
>>> Requires(hint) might do, but Requires(missingok) sounds more like it
>>> wouldn't actually do anything if the dependency is not present, which
>>> would make me wonder as to the point of having it at all.
>>>
>>> Do we want Requires(missingok) in Fedora packages?
>>>
>>
>> no - at least for yum it is not supported.
>>
>
> Is there any way of softdependencies supported by yum? Is this planned for 
> the the future, for plugin basd apps it would be nice to be able to hint to 
> the end user that certain optional plugins (with perhaps some hefty deps) 
> would be good to install, then in beginning user mode (== default) yum 
> could treat these as harddeps, and more advanced users could reconfigure 
> the behavior to for example ask the user, or just not install soft-deps.

Worth comparing what Debian do:

  http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-binarydeps

Rich.

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