Re: On Debian and Fedora experiences

["Chris Weyl" <cweyl alumni drew edu>]

On 12/4/06, Jesse Keating <jkeating redhat com> wrote:
> And how do you expect automated tools to handle these soft requirements?
> Either you always install them, or you never do, which basically brings up
> the question, whats the point?  Why do this instead of just Requires or not?
>
> A far better solution is to split the libraries that would use say aalib into
> a subpackage so that you can install the base package without needing aalib,
> and choose to install the subpackage that might pull in the aalib dep.  The
> OLPC project has helped to identify a lot of these scenarios and to split out
> functionality as such.

One thing I've been wanting for a while is a way to designate a
buildrequires as "optional."  There are many perl packages that have
builddeps that are only required for the package tests, not the actual
build part.  Having the ability to say "install this if it's around,
but don't sweat it otherwise" to these builddeps would avoid a lot of
the circular builddeps that now exist.

Not to mention make it easier when trying to rebuild these packages on
a certain enterprise distro :)

                                  -Chris

--
Chris Weyl
Ex astris, scientia