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

Thomas Bächler thomas at archlinux.org
Tue Aug 18 08:27:21 EDT 2009


Allan McRae schrieb:
> 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 1) The depends array in the PKGBUILD no longer represents the 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.

I want that solved as well. We should only add dependencies for soname 
if the corresponding packages are already in the depends array. For all 
others, print a warning or ignore them. Otherwise, (in addition to your 
concern about the PKGBUILD information being incomplete) optdepends will 
break.

> 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.

This is a valid point, and we need to investigate how much this will 
hurt. Still, I would prefer correctness over speed.

> 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.

This is not an argument, but just an opinion.

> 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.

See my answer to #1. If something is not in depends, its libraries 
should be ignored for implicit so dependencies.

> #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?

My answer to #1 solves that issue completely, but it will slow down 
makepkg a lot.

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