[aur-general] Should "base" packages be listed as dependencies?

[Eli Schwartz]

On 03/22/2017 05:36 PM, NicoHood wrote:
> On 03/22/2017 10:12 PM, Doug Newgard wrote:
>> On Wed, 22 Mar 2017 21:45:13 +0100
>> Baptiste Jonglez <baptiste at bitsofnetworks.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Am I missing something obvious?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Baptiste
>>
>> There's no specific rule about it. Some packagers will include packages in base
>> in the depends, some won't. It's completely up to them.
> 
> You need to include base packages which are not in base-devel, as the
> package won't build without those sometimes. For example some packages
> detect systemd at build time and then adds its service files to the
> package. At least as makedepends they need to be specified.
> 
> I was also angry about this first, but this is actually a more clear way
> to build packages without unnecessary dependencies. Every user should
> build packages using devtools anyways to detect deps properly and to
> produce clean packages.

makedepends, maybe.

Arch Linux does not support people who don't have systemd installed
though, and regarding Baptiste's initial example of glibc, if you don't
have glibc installed then your system is so screwed up it's not even
funny...

Given that the official instructions for installing Arch boils down to
"install the base group into a blank partition and arrange a bootloader
to boot that base group", I feel it is eminently reasonable to assume
all valid Arch Linux systems have the base group installed... especially
because some repo packages *are* built with implicit dependencies
because of that exact logic. You really can't just go around
uninstalling parts of base, or rather you can, but then it is up to you
to know when your unsupported actions are likely to break something.
(I say this with the full knowledge that I myself uninstall certain
things I don't feel belong in base at all. I am willing to debug my own
self-inflicted problems...)

Though thinking about this, I actually wonder, maybe devtools should
instruct you (rhet.) to install both base and base-devel into a build
chroot...

...

@Baptiste,

The fact that namcap emits a warning, doesn't actually mean anything. :)
namcap says/doesn't say a lot of things that are wrong, and all that
*this* means is that namcap doesn't explicitly include code to filter
out warnings for base packages. That could be because a) the namcap
maintainer felt they should be dependencies anyway, or b) no one thought
of it/decided to implement a filter, or c) both.
namcap being what it is, I am 99.999999999999% sure it is either b or c.

-- 
Eli Schwartz

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