[pacman-dev] [PATCH] add support for .so dependencies

[Christoph Schied]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 01:38:51AM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
> The "magically" adding depends is my concern.  If the libraries provided  
> by a package are to be in a depends array, then there is no need for  
> that package to be in the depends array (but should be in makedepends).   
> Otherwise this makes pacman have to do redundant checks and slows down  
> dependency resolution.

Yes, like you already said, putting package dependencies into
makedepends would solve that issue. The so-dependency is a lot nicer
because it exactly specifies on what the package depends, and not on a
"virtual" package version. You cannot produce inconsitent linking
without breaking dependencies, and you get this almost for free, as
there is no extra maintaining effort needed.


> What I would like is a description of the problem this is trying to  
> solve that could not be already handled by versioned deps?

It ensures consitent linking without providing manual versioned
dependencies. This will solve problems like
 pacman -S y <package>
because the full linking dependencies will have to be considered. This
is especially nice if you consider packages that aren't built upstream,
as linking-breakage will be detected by pacman, so it will make the
handling with AUR packages a lot easier.
My Motivation to this is that I broke my system quite often because I
wasn't aware of how simple pacman handles the dependencies, and i think
a packagemanagers purpose is to not break the system and keep everything
consistent.

greetings, Christoph