Re: [rh-rpm] Problem for upgrading glibc 2.2.2-10 to 2.2.4

[Jeff Johnson <jbj JBJ ORG>]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 11:04:35AM -0600, Rex Dieter wrote:
> On Wednesday 30 January 2002 10:42 am, you wrote:
> 
> > -Summary
> > -A cross-pointing "dependency" is preventing an upgrade of a package
> > +Summary
> > +How do I install a pair of packages if A requires B and B requires A?
> 
> This has been a pet-peeve of mine for awhile now... why on earth would 
> anyone make rpms with circular dependancies like this, instead of making a 
> single, simpler, rpm,  especially in this case (glibc) where the sources are 
> coming from one place (ie, a single src.rpm)?  I mean, heck, the contents of 
> both have to be installed anyway, why not package them that way?  In general, 
> I think this is a bad idea, and if it *must* be done, there had better be a 
> real good reason for doing so.
> 

Because packagers do what packagers do. There's no way to eliminate
interdependencies (sez Jeff who is gonna need to add dependency whiteout
to rpm today Yet Again to remove circular dependencies in legacy packaging).

In fact, there are dependencies like
    A has
	Requires: B
    B has
	PreReq: A
that are perfectly sensible, yet contain a circular dependency.

Yes, a single package containing A and B could/would eliminate the dependency
loop, but, if that scheme is extrapolated to an absurd limit to illustrate
a point, then why shouldn't the be a single package called "linux"
w/o any dependencies at all? Then we could do BSD style "make world"
from a single src.rpm as well.  Hmmm ...

73 de Jeff

-- 
Jeff Johnson	ARS N3NPQ
jbj@jbj.org	(jbj@redhat.com)
Chapel Hill, NC