On 19/01/11 15:19, Kaiting Chen wrote:
Okay everyone, every time I ask I get a different answer. According to Dziedzic and Allan 'glibc' does *not* belong in 'depends'. Also Dziedzic votes that *no* package in 'base' should be in 'depends'. Can we settle once and for all what the correct policy is? And then can we update the wiki page and all of these packages http://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/i686/glibc/so that they reflect the policy? --Kaiting.
In general, I think packages in 'base' need listed. Mainly because I do not install a fair number of the base packages and would have even less of them installed if they were not listed as dependencies. However, I think listing 'glibc' in depends is a waste of time. If a system does not have glibc installed, there are worse issues than a missing dependency for one package... If we want to be really pedantic about dependencies, we should list _ALL_ dependencies and not remove the ones that are dependencies of dependencies. We never know what dependencies will be removed on an update of a package in the dep chain. But we don't do this? Why? Because it means pacman has to make less dependency checks and thus the whole update process is a little faster, and it is more convenient to not have to explicitly list everything. For those same reasons, I see no need to list glibc as a dependency, especially for packages in [extra] and [community]. Allan