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

[Allan McRae]

On 21/01/11 22:38, Xyne wrote:
> If everyone were to use implicit dependencies then pacman would fail because no
> package would specify the required dependency. A rule that would break the
> system if it were followed by everyone is a bad rule. Expecting some to follow
> it and others not to and just hoping that everyone will keep working is
> simply bad practice. It's not minimalist... it's just lazy.
>

I pointed out that hard rules are not good.   e.g. coreutils should (and 
does) depend on glibc as it is not guaranteed that glibc is installed at 
the time when you first install coreutils (which is likely the initial 
install).   But there is no point putting glibc in the depends list for 
(e.g.) openoffice-base as it will be installed by that stage.


Two points to consider:
1) How much more complicated would it be to list all dependencies?

 > readelf -d $(pacman -Qql openoffice-base) 2>/dev/null | grep NEEDED | 
sort | uniq | wc -l
150

That is a lot of libraries... although some will be in the same package 
so that is an upper estimate.   But that is only libraries and the 
complete dep list will be longer than that.

2) It is worth the effort?   We have very few bug reports about missing 
dependencies and most (all?) of those fall into the category of missed 
soname bumps or due to people not building in chroots.  I.e. these are 
because of poor packaging and not because we make assumptions about what 
packages are installed or the dependencies of dependencies.


So I see making a change to the current approach as making things (1) 
more complicated for (2) no real benefit.

Allan