[Lucas Nussbaum] > However, that creates many small dependency cycles. I am under the > impression that dependency cycles are considered bad, but that we > have many of them already, and that no important part of our > infrastructure or tools really has problems with them. Also, they > are limited to a single source package here. > > Is there a good reason not to do the above?
Dependency loops tend to break in edge cases, and I have run into a few: - Installing a lot of packages (~1000 packages done by Debian Edu), a while back caused the set of packages to be installed to be split into lumps, and some times this installation would fail because the split would happen in the middle of such loop. I believe a workaround/fix for this has been implemented, but do not know the details. - When installing several packages and one of the packages fail to install, the recovery system for dpkg/apt fail and leave the system in an inconsistent state because only some of the packages in such loop have been unpacked and configured. - Piuparts is not able to come up with a sensible order to test packages when there are dependency loops. A workaround has been implemented. Suspect packages with loops are simply never tested by piuparts All of these issues might of cause be seen as not important parts of our infrastructure or not important problems, but I believe they are enough to still consider package dependency loops a bad idea. Are there other problems with dependency loops? Happy hacking, -- Petter Reinholdtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/2flk4glzdm5....@login2.uio.no
