[NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

[Michael A. Peters]

On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 11:24 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:

> 
> This seems to be spiraling into major complexity and lots of ways for
> developers to get it wrong.  Boo.  I've never been very thrilled with
> the idea of soft deps, and I really haven't seen it done right.

I like them. I'm sure they can be abused, but for example -

perl-Readonly)

It's a perl module (am I observant or what?? ;)
Anyway - applications that use it will require perl(Readonly)

perl-Readonly gets a performance boost from perl(Readonly::XS) but does
not explicitly require it.

That is a case where using a soft dependency will help. A perl program
requires perl(Readonly) which suggests perl(Readonly::XS).

perl(Readonly) is pure perl, noarch. perl(Readonly::XS) is a binary.
If there were a problem building the binary on one or more platform, it
might not be available, so we don't want to have it be required by
perl-Readonly. A suggest though we _do_ want.

We also can't have perl(Readonly::XS) required by the perl-Readonly rpm
because that causes a circular dependency at build time - as
perl-Readonly-XS requires perl(Readonly) to build. But a suggest - the
build machine could (should) ignore suggests.

That's why it is a good thing to have suggests.