Excessive package interdependency

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le ven 19/12/2003 à 00:09, Tyler larson a écrit :
> On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 14:56, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 15:42 -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> > > I know the "virtual package" idea has been tossed around before.  I
> > > think it is a good idea; it handles this without additional software or
> > > config files or anything.
> > 
> > No it doesn't.  Because people are now complaining that they have GNOME
> > with nautilus-cd-burner -- so they end up having to remove the GNOME
> > metapackage to remove nautilus-cd-burner and then they lose every
> > benefit of having it.  It works just as poorly as dependencies and is
> > far less fine-grained which makes it far inferior in my opinion.
> > 
> > Jeremy
> > 
> 
> I think the idea *does* have potential, but it's just currently
> incomplete. I would suspect that the ideal arrangement would be a sort
> of hierarchical package structure: Gnome contains Nautilus contains
> nautilus-cd-burner. When selecting packages to install, the user selects
> Gnome and all the default sub-categories get selected as well. He checks
> "Details" for Gnome and sees Nautilus selected. He drills down further
> to "Details" for Nautilus and finds nautilus-cd-burner selected. He
> clears the checkbox and suddenly finds himself at peace.

If you start drilling down you are in big trouble. Trees are very bad
from a human interface POV, especially when the tree branch organisation
is non-obvious. What you can have is a bundle depending on another
bundle, especially for big blobs like Gnome, but you have to be very
careful. We are not talking about something automatically processed like
rpm deps - if you introduce complex hierarchies all you'll get is a new
sort of dependency hell.

Hell, I've long since given up trying to grok anaconda organisation, and
do all new release installations selecting packages in flat mode (saving
the resulting kickstart, of course). rpm groups (as in rpm specs) is a
good example of a human-oriented hierarchical layout failure.

Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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