On Debian and Fedora experiences

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Monday, 04 December 2006 at 14:51, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Monday 04 December 2006 08:34, Matej Cepl wrote:
> > And one more I forgot -- I really miss Suggests: and Recommends: Having
> > aalib required to be installed (take a look at rpm -qi aalib -- do you
> > think you really need it?) makes me really home-sick after Debian.
> 
> And how do you expect automated tools to handle these soft requirements?  
> Either you always install them, or you never do, which basically brings up 
> the question, whats the point?  Why do this instead of just Requires or not?
> 
> A far better solution is to split the libraries that would use say aalib into 
> a subpackage so that you can install the base package without needing aalib, 
> and choose to install the subpackage that might pull in the aalib dep.  The 
> OLPC project has helped to identify a lot of these scenarios and to split out 
> functionality as such.

There is also software that doesn't depend on other tools but that will use
them if they're present. One example is chemtool, which works perfectly
fine without openbabel, but if openbabel is present, it supports more
input/output formats. Soft requires fit this situation perfectly. An
automated tool should have a configuration option or a command line
parameter that would control its behaviour WRT soft requires, forcing them
to either be installed or ignored. An interactive tool should indicate such
soft requirements' presence to the user and let him or her make a decision
for each or all packages.

Regards,
R.

-- 
Fedora Extras contributor http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DominikMierzejewski
MPlayer developer         http://rpm.greysector.net/mplayer/
"Faith manages."
        -- Delenn to Lennier in Babylon 5:"Confessions and Lamentations"