[arch-general] Frustrating Dependencies

[André Ramaciotti da Silva]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 02:31:37PM +0200, Ionut Biru wrote:
> On 11/23/2009 02:24 PM, Heiko Baums wrote:
> > Am Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:54:49 +0100
> > schrieb Tobias Powalowski<t.powa at gmx.de>:
> >
> >> Some depends are made for convenience, you can build the packages
> >> with ABS without those depends, if they don't stop the program from
> >> starting remove them and add then to ignore array in pacman.conf.
> >
> > But if I wanted to compile everything manually I would have stayed with
> > Gentoo. ;-)
> >
> > Heiko
> 
> like i said previous better to have that feature. Removing that feature 
> just because _you_ don't use and _you_ want to have minimal packages is 
> not the way.
> 
> The only way is to get the build for those packages with ABS, remove 
> smbclient from your system and recompile those packages. Is simple and 
> is automatically thought makepkg.
> 
> -- 
> Ionut

I don't want to flame, but that's why I recently moved to Gentoo. Arch is
one of the best distros I've used, but when you use a (primarily) binary
distro, the number of choices you have is reduced.

I don't blame the devs, though. They must make packages that appeal to a
large number of users and Arch ends up with packages with a big number of
dependencies. If you think about it, using a little bit more of disk space
isn't a big problem compared to the problem some people would have if the
default packages weren't compiled with these extra dependencies, because
they would have to compile their own packages, defeating the reason to use
a binary-based distro.

I know, Arch has ABS, which is a great improvement compared to others
binary-based distros, but it's still not perfect. Pacman doens't look for
custom PKGBUILDs and automatically create the new packages based on them,
and I guess it won't. Pacman wasn't meant to do that.

You can make scripts based on pacman and ABS that will do this (I've made
one shortly before changing distros), but then I realised I don't know all
the ./configure options a package has, and I find documentation on this a
little scarce. Using the 'USE' flags with emerge is much simpler in this
aspect.