On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Frank Batschulat<Frank.Batschulat at sun.com> wrote: > I think $SUBJECT really deserves some thoughts, soon. it appears with OSOL & > IPS we're now > in the same dependency hell that I always hated when dealing with the various > Linux distros. > > prime example, try removing the SUNWevolution* stuff using the package > manager. It just does not work, fails while evaluating > SUNWevolution-data-server with the error: > > Error: > Cannot remove: > ? ? ?SUNWevolution-data-server > Due to following packages that depend on it: > ? ? ?SUNWgnome-python-desktop > ? ? ?SUNWgnome-desktop-prefs > ? ? ?SUNWgnome-im-client > ? ? ?SUNWgnome-utility-applets > ? ? ?SUNWgnome-media-player > ? ? ?SUNWgnome-panel. > > I know for a fact of life: > > 1) that I do not need and want Evolution on the system (btw, does anyone use > this at all ?) > > 2) none of the packages listed above will be harmed by removing that stuff > (proven by > ? pkgrm'ing them on a non-IPS ONNV and Solaris 10 system > > are there any plans to come up with a way to deal with such situations ?
It's essential that the user be able to force an override of the dependency checking, during both install and uninstall. There's a whole range of situations where the dependencies are incompatible with user intent - either where you have a weak dependency that you can safely ignore most of the time, or where the dependency data is plain wrong, or where the dependency is only required by some components of a package which you don't need, or even where the dependencies are so tangled that a valid solution is impossible. I'm sure several bugs have been reported - see, for example: http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=5786 -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
