[Fedora-packaging] Requires(missingok)
seth vidal
skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Mon Mar 3 14:26:10 UTC 2008
On Mon, 2008-03-03 at 10:57 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > 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
>
you'll note debian doesn't specify behavior. So much in fact b/c, last
time I checked, apt just lists out suggests/recommends to the terminal
w/o doing anything with them.
Seriously - these are the hard questions to answer:
1. if foo suggests bar, baz and quux and the user is using -y in yum or
using kickstart to install do we:
a. automatically install them
b. automatically ignore them
c. something in between?
2. If foo suggest bar, baz, quux and the user has asked to remove foo
do we:
a. automatically remove them
b. automatically ignore them
c. something in between?
If we do A in both cases then they're just dependencies and should be
left that way.
If we do B then they're nothing to the user and don't matter
Now, the first question is: "But what about interactive modes, couldn't
you prompt and ask the user what to do?" The problem is installing rpms
is a non-interactive business and we have to have a sensible answer for
the non-interactive modes before anything else. Moreover, if we have a
sensible answer for non-interactive why would we bug the user to ask
them what to do along the way if our answer is sensible?
-sv
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