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

Yardena Cohen yardenack at gmail.com
Sat Mar 25 18:26:35 UTC 2017


I think we should encourage packagers to name *all* their depends and
makedepends, even if they're in base{,-devel}. Not require (yet) but
encourage.

My problem with this whole discussion is there's no hard data. There's
no clear empirical process for deciding what should be in
base{,-devel}. We only have a circular process: packages shouldn't be
removed because that might break some PKGBUILDs, and PKGBUILDs
continue to omit dependencies because they're implied. And meanwhile
the conversation devolves into bikeshedding about the virtues of nano,
etc.

The only way to break out of this cycle is for packages to start
explicitly naming dependencies. If you have shell scripts, depend on
sh. If you need bash-isms, depend on bash. If you're a daemon with
systemd units, depend on systemd. If you build with git or glibc,
makedepend on those. Once this happens we can inform our arguments
with actual numbers.


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