On 19/01/11 22:20, Thomas Bächler wrote:
Am 19.01.2011 08:08, schrieb Allan McRae:
If we want to be really pedantic about dependencies, we should list
_ALL_ dependencies and not remove the ones that are dependencies of
dependencies.
Why don't we just do the correct thing:
If package A depends on package B, and B depends on C, then A might
depend on C explicitly because it accesses C directly. Or it might only
depend on indirectly C because B accesses C. We should reflect that in
dependencies (in the first case, A depends on C, in the second case it
doesn't).
The result is this: Whenever the dependencies of B change (e.g., C is
removed), A will still work correctly.
I agree that would be the correct thing to do. In fact, I looked at
doing this to the extent of including ever package that a program linked
to in its dependencies. This increases the number of dependencies
needed for the average package in the repos greatly (from memory it
averaged a several fold increase).
The side effect of that is there is obviously a correspondingly big
increase in the number of dependency checks that pacman needs to do for
each update and the associated speed hit. I always assumed that we did
not list all dependencies for speed reasons.
Allan
