[arch-general] Frustrating Dependencies

[hollunder at gmx.at]

On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:49:19 +0100
Heiko Baums <lists at baums-on-web.de> wrote:

> Am Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:17:13 -0200
> schrieb André Ramaciotti da Silva <andre.ramaciotti at gmail.com>:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I don't think that you will stay too long with Gentoo. ;-)
> 
> It is right that you can reduce the dependencies a bit and that you
> are more flexible by setting USE flags. As far as I recall the
> difference between Gentoo and Arch Linux regarding the disk space is
> not significant if there's a difference at all, but you will need a
> lot more temporary disk space for compiling and it takes several days
> to compile the whole system and every update takes much longer than
> on Arch Linux. So I think "wasting" a bit disk space for dependencies
> which aren't needed is better than wasting too much time for
> compiling the whole system. That's why I switched from Gentoo to Arch
> Linux a while ago. On Arch Linux you still have the same control over
> the installed packages as you have on Gentoo. Don't overvalue the USE
> flags.
> 
> There's optdepends to reduce the dependencies a bit as long as a
> dependency can be made optionally. Otherwise more comfort for the
> common users is better I think.
> 
> And pacman and ABS are good as they are. There's still the
> NoUpgrade option in pacman.conf if you build a package from ABS.
> 
> Heiko

But NoUpgrade isn't really a solution, because you have to do the work
manually over and over again whether you use NoUpgrade or not.