[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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