[arch-general] Why irrelevant updates?

[Daniel Micay]

On 13/05/15 01:12 AM, Vitor Eiji Justus Sakaguti wrote:
> On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 12:51 AM, Eli Schwartz <eschwartz93 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It is what it is. FWIW -- I don't think they are "expected", base is a
>> guideline and other packages should not be making assumptions (and usually
>> don't).
>>
>> I think it could reasonably be expected that one has things like
>> bash/sed/tar installed, but anything likely to be manually removed from
>> base I expect to be listed in package dependencies.
> 
> Actually, the wiki says that the base group is always assumed to be
> installed [1] and many packages will not explicitly depend on anything
> that is in the base group even though it does depend on it in reality.
> Some bug reports about package dependencies are closed because the
> dependency is in the base group [2].
> 
> [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Makepkg
> [2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/34024

The base and base-devel groups are installed in the containers used for
building, so it's quite sane to assume they're present as build deps.

The current situation is that the runtime dependencies on base (but not
base-devel) are often implicit. The wiki is only documenting the status
quo which is that removing base packages can cause breakage and there's
nothing more official than the current state of official packages. The
wiki page itself isn't an authoritative source though. It says whatever
the last person to edit it wanted it to say.

The base group itself would need cyclic dependencies to accurately
describe things. For example, some standard C functions need to spawn a
shell so glibc and bash have a dependency cycle in practice. Someone
might want to start with just filesystem and glibc in a minimal
container, but that's not really going to work. There's no perfect solution.

I think it makes more sense to add some more explicit dependencies as
needed to make minimal containers easier and call it a day.

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