On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 5:39 AM, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@rocketmail.com> wrote:
Hopefully the "tribal knowledge" how maintainers decide what becomes a suggested and what becomes a recommended dependency will be add by Troy to the Debian and Ubuntu Wikis. The editing of the Arch Wiki IMO is nonsense, just spreading FUD.
Now you're just attacking me with no basis, so while I was done I feel the need to rebut your whole diatribe - you're out in left field with all this talk about Debian. I didn't bring it up, I don't even *like* DPKG/APT -- I am a classic Red Hat (family) guy and base most of my knowledge on RPM techniques. The whole Suggests/Recommends stuff the DEB packaging world does annoy me personally, but that's just another red herring. For your paragraph, you might want to understand Recommends and Suggests in DEB[1] have nothing to do with shared library deps. (RPM has no such concept) That said, you're not even talking about the right things here - Arch is using optdepends() for which the other two players have automatic resolution. In RPM[2] there's a macro "_use_internal_dependency_generator" that can be defined to use internal or external shared library resolution (and then it gets rather complicated from there in code). In DEB[3] it's a feature ${shlibs:Depends} that calls dh_shlibdeps for the shared library resolution (and both also have hooks for perl, e.g. - much more complicated). Both are supplemental to any manually declared requirements and actually inspect the binaries for shared libs, then add to the package metadata that this shared lib must be present before it will install. So no, Ralf, it is not "editing of the Arch Wiki IMO is nonsense, just spreading FUD" at all -- it's clarifying a situation that is unique for Arch (and realistically, Pacman) that packages can have "dangling binaries" which may not function unless you manually install the optdepends() items. To quote Rashif - "it's a hack"; documented and we move on. Let the horse die. -te [1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/dreq.en.html [2] http://rpm.org/gitweb?p=rpm.git;a=blob;f=build/rpmfc.c;hb=HEAD#l1235 [3] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debhelper/debhelper.git/tree/dh_shlibdeps