[arch-general] Please settle 'base' in 'depends' for all

[Allan McRae]

On 19/01/11 15:19, Kaiting Chen wrote:
> Okay everyone, every time I ask I get a different answer. According to
> Dziedzic and Allan 'glibc' does *not* belong in 'depends'. Also Dziedzic
> votes that *no* package in 'base' should be in 'depends'. Can we settle once
> and for all what the correct policy is? And then can we update the wiki page
> and all of these packages
> http://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/i686/glibc/so that they reflect
> the policy? --Kaiting.
>

In general, I think packages in 'base' need listed.  Mainly because I do 
not install a fair number of the base packages and would have even less 
of them installed if they were not listed as dependencies.

However, I think listing 'glibc' in depends is a waste of time.  If a 
system does not have glibc installed, there are worse issues than a 
missing dependency for one package...

If we want to be really pedantic about dependencies, we should list 
_ALL_ dependencies and not remove the ones that are dependencies of 
dependencies.  We never know what dependencies will be removed on an 
update of a package in the dep chain.   But we don't do this?  Why? 
Because it means pacman has to make less dependency checks and thus the 
whole update process is a little faster, and it is more convenient to 
not have to explicitly list everything.  For those same reasons, I see 
no need to list glibc as a dependency, especially for packages in 
[extra] and [community].

Allan