On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 05:19:41PM -0700, Chris Quenelle wrote: > You are portraying software as either "broken" or "working" as a black > and white issue, and I don't think it's black and white. I don't > think it's obvious that every single file in a package must be > "functional" as decided by the IPS automatic dependency checker.
You've got this backwards. Try explaining to your college math professor that correct and incorrect aren't absolutes. You can't even pull such a stunt in english class, since your writing has to conform to rules to be acceptable, and you have to write something that meets the expectations for the assignment's criteria. As an engineer, I find the dichotomy to be better expressed as being between failed and operational. Whether we're building a car, a bridge, a microprocessor, or a computer program, we don't want to deliver something that we know will fail. The whole point of the dependency checker is to make sure that what arrives will actually work. > As another example, the NetBeans packages deliver small utility > binaries for a number of platforms bundled into one large product > that has identical bits across multiple platforms. Presumably, you > would say that they shouldn't be doing that, since the dynamic linker > for Linux is not present in OpenSolaris. You shouldn't be doing this, since we have a set of tags that would allow you to only install the linux binaries on a linux system. > There is also a larger philosophical issue about how draconian to be > with regards to automatically detected dependencies. I can see that > you are pretty far towards the strict side of the spectrum. I would > be much further towards the loose/audit side of things. I am only > asking that we back off a little more towards the middle of the > spectrum on this issue. For example, we could support explicit > dependency overrides that could be put in manually only when a > specific dependency was deemed to be unnecessary by the package > maintainer. It sounds to me like you're arguing for a solution that will trade package maintainer effort for reliability. It would make sense to refactor these packages into smaller pieces. Then users could add them if they want to, knowing that this may result in additional software so that the scripts will actually work. Perhaps installing only partially related pieces of software as one monolithic package is the problem and not the dependency checking mechanism? -j _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list pkg-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
