<quote who="[EMAIL PROTECTED]">
> > I built a system, used apt-get to install mythtv and 50M later had it
> > working.
> > I built a system, downloaded lame-src mythtv-src and the total footprint
> > was 10M by the time it worked. Ummm 40M of 'something'!
>
> apt tends to drag in anything that even smells related ("tv" rhymes with
> "hippie" so you are going to need some hair-care programs with that).
apt doesn't do this, the package definition tells apt to do it. More often
than not, packagers will include the absolute bare minimum in the Depends
line, and put useful related stuff in Recommends and Suggests.
> I've noticed that most debian package authors tend to set dependencies to
> be "everything that I have on my box right now" rather than thinking
> carefully about what they really need.
This is poppycock. Most packagers use debhelper to do the library dependency
information for them. If binaries in the package use those libraries, they
are automagic dependencies. On very rare occasions, that may bring in
libraries that are not 100% necessary. More often than that, debhelper will
depend on unnecessarily new versions (it depends on the current package
version, not a matrix of shlibsyms to package versions, but that is being
looked at). There are similar debhelper tools for Python, Mono, etc.
So, in the common case, dependencies are *exactly what the binaries* require
and no more (and it's the "no more" bit that is the source of more bugs than
"depending on too much").
- Jeff
--
OSCON 2005: August 1st-5th http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/
What do you get when you cross a web server and a hen?
Apoache.
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