[arch-dev-public] How the use of "provides" can damage the dependency tree

[Allan McRae]

Roman Kyrylych wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 21:23, Aaron Griffin<aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 1:21 PM, Thomas Bächler<thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:
>>     
>>> Pierre Schmitz schrieb:
>>>       
>>>> What do we learn by this? The use of provides can be dangerous when the
>>>> providers have different deps. I wonder if we have more such problems.
>>>>         
>>> That's why namcap should use direct link-level dependencies using readelf
>>> and not rely on the fact that a dependency already provides the library in
>>> question.
>>>       
>> Actually, this would probably help us in a lot of ways - it'd make
>> finding deps for rebuilds easier
>>     
>
> I completely agree here.
> Could we please change our default policy to always include
> direct dependencies (checked from readelf output)
> even if another dependency already pulls them?
>   

So listing every single package that contains a library that is being 
linked to...  Apart from being annoying to maintain (especially if we 
add versioning to them as well), that would really increase the amount 
of work pacman has to do in dependency checking.  e.g. for subversion 
there is currently two dependencies, but even only considering 
/usr/bin/svn there would be 10x more than that.

Allan