Dependencies [was Re: bugs, bugs, bugs!]

[Michael Schwendt]

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On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:54:30 +0200, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:

> Hi Bill,
> 
> > There are oodles of tools to solve this problem (redhat-config-packages,
> > up2date, yum, ....) Adding extraneous dependencies isn't a solution.
> 
>  This sounds a bit like putting the cart before the horse. A large part of the
> problems that people are having with dependencies would be solved if they
> were able to query the package without requiring an rpmdb or another tool
> and still get a list of packages to install instead of a list of cryptic library
> names. (I am not arguing the file dependencies should be dropped.)

For several distributions that use RPM, it started like this,
explicit "Requires: ". And still, some users complained about
"dependency hell". The reason was simply that in case of a long
dependency chain, you end up with a long list of packages to install
manually. Who really wants that? 

Now as soon as you start using small helper scripts to traverse the
dependency tree and collect explicit package names, this is becoming
messy. Just observe, that you need physical access to all missing
packages in order to solve dependencies (the complete rpmdb takes
less space). You don't want to include the complete dependency chain
in every individual package, do you? So, why not go one step further
and do the real thing? That is, upon package installation, let RPM
and package tool front-ends solve the dependency chain automatically
by querying an rpmdb and possibly network servers?

As a side-note, RPM cannot know that program X from package Y is
executed in script A from package B. Hence in some cases, explicitly
listed requirements are likely to stay.

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