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

[Allan McRae]

Thomas Bächler wrote:
> I want to explicitly ask you about the cons for this feature. What do 
> you think is a hard reason NOT to do it?

1) The depends array in the PKGBUILD no longer represents the 
information in the package.

2) Lots more dependencies for packages.  This will slow pacman down.  
Also, I believe that provides are slower than depends to resolve.  I 
could be completely wrong there... but that would make this even worse.  
So it does "hurt" everyone.

3) I believe this should be implemented manually for a very small number 
of package sets (shells & readline being the main case), but I do not 
see a general need for this in a large number of packages.  Note that 
this is not much harder that your option of adding a "sodepends" 
variable - it just requires adding a versioning on the library.

4) How would you negate this to allow a library to be an optdep other 
than just not using this feature?  I am generally against adding extra 
syntax to PKGBUILDs unless there is a very strong reason to do so.

#1 is my primary critisism.  Every other option in makepkg that does 
something magically (removes files, compresses files, etc), has the 
files they act on defined specifically in makepkg.conf and thus are not 
really magical at all.  We should be able to look at a PKGBUILD and see 
the information about a package.  I know that all the libraries that are 
magically depends should have their package included in at least the 
makedepends, but then how do we tell what really are makedeps?

Allan