surely an ordinary package shouldn't depend on devel packages?

Mike Burger mburger at bubbanfriends.org
Tue Jun 3 13:49:13 UTC 2008


> Hi,
>
> While looking through the updates mail, I saw something that sounded
intriguing, "hamster-applet."  Did a yum info query on it, then thought
I'd install it to have a look.  But it wanted to drag in a ridiculous
number of dependencies, most of them devel packages.
>
> Surely a precompiled non-devel RPM shouldn't be dragging in development
packages?  That's got to be a major design screw up.  Doesn't
> incorporating a package into a repo involve some sort of checking
procedure to reject packages trying to do that sort of nonsense?
(Non-devel packages depending on devel packages.)

<snip>

Quite often, those -devel packages have library files included on which
the non-devel package depends.  Packages that depend on the kernel-devel
packages spring to mind, but many others do, as well.

Personally, I'd rather have the appropriate -devel package installed, so
that the library dependencies are met, than to have an application litter
the system with its own copy of the same libraries.

As an example, see the thread I started yesterday, subject:

"Can't log into KDE on F9, via nx, after recent updates? Error message
about kstartupconfig4."

The issue was that the NessusClient application, compiled for Fedora 9,
includes a copy of various QT libraries, and the installation process
places them in /opt/nessus/lib, places an entry in /etc/ld.so.conf,
pointing at that directory, and then runs ldconfig.

Because there were pointers at incompatible QT libraries, the process of
logging into KDE4 became non-functional.  Commenting out the
/opt/nessus/lib line and rerunning ldconfig fixed it for me (thanks to Rex
Dieter for helping me get my head back out of my tuchas on that one), but
if the NessusClient had relied, instead, on the QT libraries that come
with F9 (or had pointed out that I needed to install specific devel
packages to make things work), I'd have not run into that situation in the
first place.
-- 
Mike Burger
http://www.bubbanfriends.org

Visit the Dog Pound II BBS
telnet://dogpound2.citadel.org or http://dogpound2.citadel.org

To be notified of updates to the web site, visit:

https://www.bubbanfriends.org/mailman/listinfo/site-update

or send a blank email message to:

site-update-subscribe at bubbanfriends.org






More information about the fedora-list mailing list