[arch-general] Frustrating Dependencies

[Gergely Imreh]

2009/11/23 Andrea Scarpino <andrea at archlinux.org>:
> On 23/11/2009, Gergely Imreh <imrehg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Maybe because people have personal preferences, since all these
>> applications are different from each other?
> So don't be unhappy if they requires dependencies that aren't made for
> your environment :)

I'm sorry, to me this reads as one have two choice: accept or leave.
But that's not the case, as you yourself noticed that the packaging
can be made more rational. It's open source, people can do try fixing
things / suggesting fixes instead of just accepting the status quo.

I think the original issue can be cast into a broader topic: (without
giving any references, because I don't have any from the top of my
head right now) I encounter quite a few packages that have
dependencies down the chain that don't seem to be related to the
original package. This seems to be a general open source issue. It's
great to have libraries to divide the task into smaller pieces and
reuse whatever possible, but projects seem to be less effectivee
dividing between "depends" and "optdepends". Sometimes it's an
upstream issue, sometimes it's packaging. With more practice and more
eyes checking things out it will be better.

Anyway, this is just an observation, Arch seems to do quite well in
general (thanks Maintainers:). I'll look around the repos again and
might come up for some more repackaging ideas for the next bug
squashing day or something...

>> As a comparison, looking at the Ubuntu packaging of digikam:
>> digikam -> kdepimlibs5 -> libakonadiprivate1 (and no mysql only if one
>> installs the whole akonadi-server)
>> Might worth checking out... (libaconadiprivate1: This package contains
>> private libraries used by the Akonadi PIM storage service.)
> Yes, I looked akonadi's Makefile and we can split akonadi package in
> akonadi and akonadi-server easy. I'll do some try tomorrow.

That sounds great! Cheers! :)
   Greg