On Wed, 2003-07-30 at 06:52, Michael Schwendt wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 03:41:09 +0200, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> On systems lacking a complete package database to query, the explicit
> naming of the depended on packages would solve the problem of unknown
> dependencies. Splitting a package and moving a library to a new package
> would possibly leave a redundant package requirement in a depending on
> rpm, but the requirement for the library would be still available. If a
> package maintainer did miss such a library split the redundant package
> requirement would most probably not harm and be updated as soon as
> spotted.
>
> Consistently mentioning both the required packages as well as the
> libraries would make the rpm db system more self-contained and probably
> solve a lot of dependency problems.
For some packages such a list of explicit requirements can get
pretty long and would require an extra maintenance effort. For
instance, not only when depending packages are renamed or when the
dependencies of a package change (user would install redundant
stuff). But also when a particular version of a library is found
only in a particular package revision. We should rely on tools which
solve the dependencies for us and which find out what package to
install to get libfoo.so.3.
> On systems lacking a complete package database to query,
... there should be an alternative way like querying a remote
package database server.
And that is effectively how dependency-solving tools like up2date, apt,
yum, etc. work... by querying remote servers, caching appropriate
meta-deta locally, and figuring out all of this for you. Leonard: why
won't you use one of those tools and thus avoid this whole problem?
--Jeremy
--
/---------------------------------------------------------------------\
| Jeremy Portzer jeremyp(a)pobox.com
trilug.org/~jeremy |
| GPG Fingerprint: 712D 77C7 AB2D 2130 989F E135 6F9F F7BC CC1A 7B92 |
\---------------------------------------------------------------------/