Excessive package interdependency

[Bill Nottingham]

Jef Spaleta (jspaleta at princeton.edu) said: 
> Doing anything like Suggests/Recommends correctly would take a HELL of a
> lot more package testing in order to do correctly. How does a packager
> really know that a linked library is not a required dependancy to
> prevent the program from running in most/all usage cases?
> 
> ldd /usr/bin/mc
> 
> How does the packager know which of those libraries are not true
> dependancies? I think we are talking about an order of magnitude more
> testing to get Suggests/Recommends to work reliably correctly.

You can't use Suggests/Recommends, with the mc case, it's a *direct*
linkage (DT_NEEDED). If the library isn't there, the binary does not load.

Bill