Excessive package interdependency
Nicolas Mailhot
Nicolas.Mailhot at laPoste.net
Tue Dec 23 13:08:04 UTC 2003
Nils Philippsen wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 07:50, seth vidal wrote:
>>it'd be handy to know what a user selected group-wise.
>
>
> When reading this thread I had the idea, that _if_ an RPM package could
> "suggest" other packages/dependencies this should be doable.
In-package suggestions has lots of drawbacks :
- it's unidimentional - you can not do suggestions following different
suggestion logics (well you can but the user will have *lots* of trouble
following you)
- it forces everyone to repackage software every single time you want to
change suggestions. This is a big problem - it hurts third-party
repositories, you end up re-building and re-QAing perfectly sane
packages (from a system point of view)
- it hides the big picture from the packager. While system dependencies
must be consistent and the package manager will force both packager and
user to respect them, with in-package suggestions it's real easy to get
foo suggest bar which suggests baz but baz does not play well with foo.
(just think : gnome suggests artwork which suggests kde)
An external overlay is much more sensible. You can have several profiles
re-using the same packages with following different logics, third-party
sites distributing profiles that use core components (example -
freeworld music profile with mp3 addons...), updated profiles without
mass-rebuilding, etc. Remember - it's named dependencies too but it is
not system dependencies. The core rpm system does not care at all about
them - it can work without them very well like today. There is
absolutely no reason to force them into the packages themselves, except
that another well known system did it for years (and RH people kept
repeating it was a bad idea).
Stop thinking complex recursive multi-level hierarchical integrated
systems. We are targeting humans. Humans are lazy (or dumb, depending on
your worldview). A human can only easily grok short flatlists (like in
anaconda groups today). Anything more complex would be self-defeating.
Cheers,
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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