On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 01:38:51AM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:

The "magically" adding depends is my concern. If the libraries provided by a package are to be in a depends array, then there is no need for that package to be in the depends array (but should be in makedepends). Otherwise this makes pacman have to do redundant checks and slows down dependency resolution.

Yes, like you already said, putting package dependencies into makedepends would solve that issue. The so-dependency is a lot nicer because it exactly specifies on what the package depends, and not on a "virtual" package version. You cannot produce inconsitent linking without breaking dependencies, and you get this almost for free, as there is no extra maintaining effort needed.

What I would like is a description of the problem this is trying to solve that could not be already handled by versioned deps?

It ensures consitent linking without providing manual versioned dependencies. This will solve problems like pacman -S y <package> because the full linking dependencies will have to be considered. This is especially nice if you consider packages that aren't built upstream, as linking-breakage will be detected by pacman, so it will make the handling with AUR packages a lot easier. My Motivation to this is that I broke my system quite often because I wasn't aware of how simple pacman handles the dependencies, and i think a packagemanagers purpose is to not break the system and keep everything consistent. greetings, Christoph