[pacman-dev] implement .so dependencies?

[Nagy Gabor]

> > On 02/02/2010 09:13 PM, Nagy Gabor wrote:
> > > This is not the competent ML to decide if ArchLinux's repos should use
> > > these flags, personally I have some concerns about db.tar.gz size. (That
> > > needs testing, which requires patched makepkg, too.)
> > 
> > I've repacked core and the results are quite good:
> > 
> > core.db.tar.gz from 35KB to 40KB
> > unpacked db from 2.1MB to 2.2MB
> > 
> 
> Here is a little explanation for this nice result:
> 
> Florian's patch puts a library into sodepends iff the .so file is owned
> by one of its _direct_ dependencies (optdepends are omitted). That is
> why the "sodepends" array is shorter than expected (by me).
> 
> You may say this method is not as safe as it should be, but imho it
> is safe enough (if the user doesn't use the -d switch, of course):
> For example, yesterday I broke all my gtk2 packages due to my custom
> cairo build (I should have rebuild it with recent libpng). With
> soprovides/sodepends enabled, pacman would catch the broken
> cairo-cleartype->libpng dependency in the firefox->gtk2->cairo->libpng
> dependency chain. So in sum, sodepends/soprovides trick is just ensures
> that all "normal" dependencies are not broken in .so level neither.
> 
> Moreover, due to this feature, distros can introduce
> sodepends/soprovides step-by-step (without rebuilding all packages in
> the repo), or they can limit this feature to some "critical" packages.
> 

Basically, +1 for implementing this to makepkg and use this in
ArchLinux's repos. (Although this ML is not competent ;-)

I can see only one edge case that should be addressed (that's why I'm
writing this e-mail): Dependencies can be satisfied via provision. What
to do then? (That is not handled at all atm.)

Bye