Opinions seems to me to go a bit too much in one single direction on this _ so let me try to play the devil's advocate..
On Dec 9, 2003, at 11:44 PM, Max Horn wrote:
Am Dienstag, 09.12.03 um 21:56 Uhr schrieb TheSin:If you install pkgs you don't know, right. On the other hand, if you have
netpbm10 has 2 children: -> netpbm10-shlibs -> netpbm-bin so netpbm-bin has two parents
Ugh! That's quite a nasty trick. In particular it means that if I do this:
"fink install netpbm netpbm-bin"
Fink will *not* do what I expect it to do...
netpbm-bin installed, and you do a blind "fink update-all", you'll stay up to date...
Why was this done? Why not "netpbm10-bin", which then "Provides: netpbm-bin" ?
I can't speak for the maintainers of all those packages, but one seemingly obvious
motivation would be that this way, a user who has "selected" netpbm-bin
and just wants to stay up to date, will stay so, automatically via "update-all".
I.e., the fact that the functionality of update-all has basically been broken by
the spitoffs venture is largely resolved by this 'trick', at least in as much concerns
the users. (Of course it doesn't help to update the deps of other packages _
but that's an other issue _ at least the user's problem is largely solved by such a
system.)
The fact that a command what not originally conceived with a specific use in mind
is no argument against such use: specs specify what the command should do,
not what the user should, and as long as the use conforms with them, the better
if it is creative _ it only shows addtional merit in the original design.
So I could see an argument for not tightening the specs, even if minor adjustments
in fink are required to fully support such use, because the alternatives to fully
support an 'update-all' function _ from the user's point of view _ seem so much
heavier, and hence further away.
JF Mertens
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