Darren J Moffat wrote:
Jonathan Edwards wrote:
On Aug 25, 2009, at 9:12 AM, Darren J Moffat wrote:
4. You want package A but not package B that it depends on. (Or
packages
C, D, E, F... that get pulled in.) Am I managing the system, or is
the system
managing me?
Why would you want that if A really does depend on B,... ?
Isn't this just another case of 3 ?
A couple of example cases for this:
(1) a package contains a binary or driver you might want, but you
don't care about the GUI component that's also in the package .. the
GUI dependencies are "require"d but you don't really want them since
you don't want to pull in the entire windowing environment.
Arguably that is a packaging bug and there should be 2 (or maybe more)
packages there.
However that doesn't help if you can't influence the upstream packager.
In which case I would suggest using pkgrecv to create your own version
of the package (fairly easily I might add) and publish it to your own
repository and set its publisher as preferred.
(2) there's no mechanism for an OR .. in other words - let's say that
package A has a requirement for a certain library, but that
requirement could be met by either package B (which pulls in packages
C, D, E, F) .. or package X (which only pulls in packages Y and Z)
I find this one a very interesting case.
There are a number of things which need a "database". Sometimes they
can be built to support one or more of sqlite, mysql, postgres. So this
is a good example of an optional dependency. I might not want to deploy
using mysql so I don't want it installed.
This is the example we've discussed before, but no *actual* example
packages (that currently exist) have yet been documented. 'optional'
dependencies (which pkg(5)) supports could be used here.
If this was truly a common usage scenario that we needed to support,
then I would say that the dependency mechanism should be enhanced rather
than trying to ignore a deficiency by using the sledgehammer of --force
or --no-deps.
Cheers,
--
Shawn Walker
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