On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: > [Ian Jackson] > > The only argument I've heard against circular dependencies as a > > general rule is that they can trigger a particularly stupid (and > > probably not very hard to fix) bug in apt, > > You seem to have missed the argument that packages with circular > dependencies are impossible to install and configure in the correct > (dependency) order, and thus will end up being installed and > configured in a nondeterministic order instead. It is documented > that dpkg try its best to find a sensible order for the packages, > but it is bound to fail one way or another if two packages really do > need each other to be configured before they are configured.
Packages which have circular dependencies and depend on the other package being configured are buggy; at most they can depend on the other package being unpacked. Since there is no way to specify this kind of dependency, Depends: is as close as you can get. Don Armstrong -- It has always been Debian's philosophy in the past to stick to what makes sense, regardless of what crack the rest of the universe is smoking. -- Andrew Suffield in [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
