On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 01:38:51AM +1000, Allan McRae wrote: > The "magically" adding depends is my concern. If the libraries provided > by a package are to be in a depends array, then there is no need for > that package to be in the depends array (but should be in makedepends). > Otherwise this makes pacman have to do redundant checks and slows down > dependency resolution.
Yes, like you already said, putting package dependencies into makedepends would solve that issue. The so-dependency is a lot nicer because it exactly specifies on what the package depends, and not on a "virtual" package version. You cannot produce inconsitent linking without breaking dependencies, and you get this almost for free, as there is no extra maintaining effort needed. > What I would like is a description of the problem this is trying to > solve that could not be already handled by versioned deps? It ensures consitent linking without providing manual versioned dependencies. This will solve problems like pacman -S y <package> because the full linking dependencies will have to be considered. This is especially nice if you consider packages that aren't built upstream, as linking-breakage will be detected by pacman, so it will make the handling with AUR packages a lot easier. My Motivation to this is that I broke my system quite often because I wasn't aware of how simple pacman handles the dependencies, and i think a packagemanagers purpose is to not break the system and keep everything consistent. greetings, Christoph
