Kenneth Harrison wrote:
On Wednesday, January 27, 2016, akhiezer <[email protected]> wrote:
Answering two posts here.
It's noted that when a package 'A' gets moved from blfs to lfs, then for those packages 'B*' in blfs that had package 'A' as a dependency (required/recommended/optional/&c), all of the deps-infos related to package 'A', gets ripped out of blfs: and packages 'B*' are just "assumed" to "need" "all" of lfs. IOW, deps info gets thrown away; and the many folks that know that e.g. acl/attr/&c are _not_ _really_ needed in lfs, and belong more in blfs, then essentially each of those folks have to restore and maintain the deps infos themselves, to 'forks' of b/lfs ; it causes unnecessary replication of work across folks.
Although it may be used that way, it has never been the objective to document every upstream package in BLFS. That's too big a job. We do make the simplifying assumption that LFS is installed as written.
If there is good quantified data - e.g. via analyses of deps-chains - for the core set of packages that really should form the lfs platform, then fine. Without that, there seems to be a tendency to move things from blfs -> lfs 'because we can' - 'because we want to'; it's reminiscent of the deps 'confusion' in blfs from a bunch of years back, whereby deps were listed as 'required' because it was thought in some quarters that they really would in practice be _wanted_ by (some hazy notion of) 'approx-everyone, shurely?' (the old "well, why would you _not_ want them" disingenuity that occurs too much in linux areas) - plus another unhealthy does of 'because we can', 'because we want to'.
LFS has never designed to be a minimal system. There are several packages that could be omitted. In this case we are considering the addition of pcre because without it two LFS packages, less and grep, are incomplete. I'll note that there are other dependencies in LFS -- xorg, emacs, doxygen, some perl modules, ghostscript, pam, libsigsegv, ed, cracklib, gtk+2, tcl, ruby, gpm, and some external packages that we do not install in LFS.
In general, the reason we don't install them is that they just require too many other dependencies. We make a judgement about what fits the LFS goals. What you are advocating is basically to change a side effect into a goal. We do not have the resources to do that, but if you want to contribute a list of implied dependencies in BLFS packages that are in LFS, then we will be glad to publish it.
Just an idea, why not add information into LFS to list any and all Required, Recommended, and Optional dependencies available in BLFS and out-of-tree?
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/appendices/dependencies.html -- Bruce -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
