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

[Magnus Therning]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 13:07, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 19/01/11 22:49, Magnus Therning wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 12:50, Allan McRae<allan at archlinux.org>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 19/01/11 22:20, Thomas Bächler wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Am 19.01.2011 08:08, schrieb Allan McRae:
>>>>>
>>>>> If we want to be really pedantic about dependencies, we should list
>>>>> _ALL_ dependencies and not remove the ones that are dependencies of
>>>>> dependencies.
>>>>
>>>> Why don't we just do the correct thing:
>>>>
>>>> If package A depends on package B, and B depends on C, then A might
>>>> depend on C explicitly because it accesses C directly. Or it might only
>>>> depend on indirectly C because B accesses C. We should reflect that in
>>>> dependencies (in the first case, A depends on C, in the second case it
>>>> doesn't).
>>>>
>>>> The result is this: Whenever the dependencies of B change (e.g., C is
>>>> removed), A will still work correctly.
>>>
>>> I agree that would be the correct thing to do.  In fact, I looked at
>>> doing
>>> this to the extent of including ever package that a program linked to in
>>> its
>>> dependencies.  This increases the number of dependencies needed for the
>>> average package in the repos greatly (from memory it averaged a several
>>> fold
>>> increase).
>>
>> I don't quite understand what you mean, did you add the transitive
>> closure of all dependencies to the package, or did you only add all
>> direct dependencies?
>
> Essentially "readelf -d" on the files and add all needed packages to the
> dependencies.  I.e. list all packages that are directly linked.
>
> Its has been many years since I did graph theory... but isn't a "transitive
> closure" essentially what we have been doing with only listing the top level
> of dependencies and having them cover the rest?

Nope, it's the "opposite":

 • A depends on B
 • B depends on C

If the PKGBUILD for A lists the transitive closure, then it would have

 depends=(B C)

As we do now the transitive closure is calculated by pacman in order
to make sure all dependencies are installed.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4
email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus