[arch-general] Frustrating Dependencies

[Brendan Long]

On Mon, 2009-11-23 at 16:17 +0100, hollunder at gmx.at wrote:
> 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.

I'm actually using Arch primarily because it's so little work to make
your own packages (I realized that no distro is going to have every
package I want, although Arch has most of them). In most cases building
the next version of a package consists of changing the package number
and then running makepkg. It would be nice if there was a script that
attempted to do this on updates and then informed you if it didn't work.
-Brendan