On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Bruce A. Locke wrote:
We need a sane dependency tree for the vast amount of software out there for Red Hat that doesn't require "--forcing" and "--nodeps" or end-users spending time with "rpmbuild". (Small repositories will of course still exist for those _really_ niche packages). Encouraging the development of even more external repositories sounds like a sure way of increasing the pain of "RPM dependency hell".
I agree with you that we need to avoid an RPM dependency hell. However, I do not agree with you that the only way to do it is to have all packages shipped by one central organisation.
Instead, we need to work on some software that can detect dependency conflicts between the external repository and the core distribution and rebuilds the RPMS in the repository.
Of course, this software would be run by the people who maintain the package repositories, so the repositories are in sync with the core distribution.
Nothing like a cron job to automatically keep the RPMS in the repositories up to date with the core distribution ;)
It really isn't hard to automatically bump the release number and rebuild the RPM, nor should it be very hard to figure out when exactly it is needed ... right at the point when apt-get starts complaining ;)
Now we just need to write this software ...