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

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Wed, 2003-07-30 at 06:52, Michael Schwendt wrote:
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> On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 03:41:09 +0200, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> 
> >  On systems lacking a complete package database to query, the explicit 
> > naming of the depended on packages would solve the problem of unknown 
> > dependencies. Splitting a package and moving a library to a new package 
> > would possibly leave a redundant package requirement in a depending on 
> > rpm, but the requirement for the library would be still available. If a 
> > package maintainer did miss such a library split the redundant package 
> > requirement would most probably not harm and be updated as soon as 
> > spotted.
> > 
> >  Consistently mentioning both the required packages as well as the 
> > libraries would make the rpm db system more self-contained and probably 
> > solve a lot of dependency problems.
> 
> For some packages such a list of explicit requirements can get
> pretty long and would require an extra maintenance effort. For
> instance, not only when depending packages are renamed or when the
> dependencies of a package change (user would install redundant
> stuff). But also when a particular version of a library is found
> only in a particular package revision. We should rely on tools which
> solve the dependencies for us and which find out what package to
> install to get libfoo.so.3.
> 
> >  On systems lacking a complete package database to query,
> 
> ... there should be an alternative way like querying a remote
> package database server.
> 

And that is effectively how dependency-solving tools like up2date, apt,
yum, etc. work... by querying remote servers, caching appropriate
meta-deta locally, and figuring out all of this for you.  Leonard:  why
won't you use one of those tools and thus avoid this whole problem?

--Jeremy

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| Jeremy Portzer       jeremyp at pobox.com       trilug.org/~jeremy     |
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