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

[Pierre Schmitz]

Hi devs,

I just had an interesting case where a missing dependency cam be unnoticed for 
a long time.

I was told that KDE from kde-unstable could not start due to a missing lib: 
libxdamage. Neither namcap or anyone else did found this missing dep.

And here was the solution: libxdamage is needed by libgl which in turn is 
needed by mesa ->qt->kdelibs etc.. 

But if you have nvidia-utils installed which provides libgl but does not 
depend on libxdamage or libxxf86vm you'll end up with a broken dependency 
tree.

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.

Pierre

-- 

Pierre Schmitz, http://users.archlinux.de/~pierre