showing dependency trees

Björn Persson bjorn at xn--rombobjrn-67a.se
Mon Aug 24 22:31:43 UTC 2009


Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 2009/8/24 Björn Persson <bjorn at xn--rombobjrn-67a.se>:
> > One likely cause is that package C, somewhere in the dependency chain
> > between A and E, contains too many different functions. In that case C
> > should probably be split into subpackages C1 and C2, where C1 depends on
> > A but E depends on C2. Then E would no longer depend on A.
>
> I hope you understand that chasing down every single instance of this
> situation ultimately leads to a situation that is more easily
> duplicated by making the build process automatically split every
> library binary into its own subpackage.  If we aren't willing to do
> that automatically, then why is it worth the time to have multiple
> individuals systematically chase them down?  I'm wary that the sort of
> checking you want to do is a rabbit hole that will require significant
> continued human effort as codebases shift.

On the other hand, not addressing such situations at all ultimately leads to a 
huge tangle where every single package depends on pretty much all of Fedora 
Everything. It's a matter of finding a good balance.

Splitting every library binary into its own subpackage might not always 
resolve the situation by the way. I have seen libraries that lump together all 
sorts of unrelated functions in a single .so file. There are also libraries 
written in interpreted languages that aren't compiled into binaries, and in 
some cases the dependencies might not even be libraries at all.

Björn Persson

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