[arch-general] depends vs. optdepends

[Troy Engel]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 5:39 AM, Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mardorf at rocketmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hopefully the "tribal knowledge" how maintainers decide what becomes a
> suggested and what becomes a recommended dependency will be add by Troy
> to the Debian and Ubuntu Wikis. The editing of the Arch Wiki IMO is
> nonsense, just spreading FUD.

Now you're just attacking me with no basis, so while I was done I feel
the need to rebut your whole diatribe - you're out in left field with
all this talk about Debian. I didn't bring it up, I don't even *like*
DPKG/APT -- I am a classic Red Hat (family) guy and base most of my
knowledge on RPM techniques. The whole Suggests/Recommends stuff the
DEB packaging world does annoy me personally, but that's just another
red herring. For your paragraph, you might want to understand
Recommends and Suggests in DEB[1] have nothing to do with shared
library deps. (RPM has no such concept)

That said, you're not even talking about the right things here - Arch
is using optdepends() for which the other two players have automatic
resolution. In RPM[2] there's a macro
"_use_internal_dependency_generator" that can be defined to use
internal or external shared library resolution (and then it gets
rather complicated from there in code). In DEB[3] it's a feature
${shlibs:Depends} that calls dh_shlibdeps for the shared library
resolution (and both also have hooks for perl, e.g. - much more
complicated). Both are supplemental to any manually declared
requirements and actually inspect the binaries for shared libs, then
add to the package metadata that this shared lib must be present
before it will install.

So no, Ralf, it is not "editing of the Arch Wiki IMO is nonsense, just
spreading FUD" at all -- it's clarifying a situation that is unique
for Arch (and realistically, Pacman) that packages can have "dangling
binaries" which may not function unless you manually install the
optdepends() items. To quote Rashif - "it's a hack"; documented and we
move on. Let the horse die.

-te

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/dreq.en.html
[2] http://rpm.org/gitweb?p=rpm.git;a=blob;f=build/rpmfc.c;hb=HEAD#l1235
[3] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debhelper/debhelper.git/tree/dh_shlibdeps