Re: how to change dependencies?

[Tim Mooney <mooney dogbert cc ndsu NoDak edu>]

In regard to: Re: how to change dependencies?, James Olin Oden said (at...:

>On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Marten Lehmann wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm trying to build a .rpm for the perl-module SOAP::Lite. This module
>> offers SOAP-interfaces for different protocols, like HTTP, SMTP, POP3
>> etc. Even very rarely used protocols like Jabber and MQSeries are
>> offered. My problem is, that I don't need to use Jabber and I don't have
>> MQSeries. During the configuration, I can disable support for both
>> features. But when the rpm is build and I'm trying to install it, I get
>>
>> error: Failed dependencies:
>>           perl(MIME::Lite) is needed by perl-SOAP-Lite-0.55-1
>>           perl(MQClient::MQSeries) is needed by perl-SOAP-Lite-0.55-1
>>           perl(MQSeries) is needed by perl-SOAP-Lite-0.55-1
>>           perl(MQSeries::Message) is needed by perl-SOAP-Lite-0.55-1
>>           perl(MQSeries::Queue) is needed by perl-SOAP-Lite-0.55-1
>>           perl(MQSeries::QueueManager) is needed by perl-SOAP-Lite-0.55-1
>>           perl(Net::Jabber) >= 1.0021 is needed by perl-SOAP-Lite-0.55-1
>>
>> I didn't set any dependencis, rpmbuild seems to find it itself within
>> the %install-macro. How can I change this or how can I disable automatic
>> dependency checking?
>>
>It sure does and you don't want to change this.  Your scripts do use these
>perl modules, and so they do depend on them.

I rarely find myself disagreeing with you, but this is one of the times.
I have encountered times when the auto dependency stuff picks up instances
of

	use Foo::Bar;

inside a perldoc section.

There are also lots of cases where "dependency" is too strong a word.
For example, I've installed and used the perl-libwww module for years,
and it wasn't until trying to build it on Red Hat ES 3 that I discovered
that there are parts of it that need HTML::Parser and Font::ATM to work.
There are also perl modules that can detect, at runtime, whether a module
is present, and work around its abscence, sometimes with reduced
functionality.

>  Its easy to grab the cpan
>modules you are depending on, and then run them against cpanflute2 (found
>in the RPM::Specfile cpan module),

That's fine for simple modules with modest requirements, but it gets to
be a huge PITA for some of the more esoteric modules.  I've spent entire
evenings tracking down ever growing chains of perl module dependencies,
just to get one module installed that only needs its dependencies for 10%
of optional functionality.

I think auto dependency detection is a good thing, it's just that the
way perl handles modules and the "optional but recommended" nature of
some module dependencies doesn't mesh well with RPM's notion of
"required".

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                              mooney@dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak.edu
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