Re: dpkg-buildpackage now reorganizing debian/control Depends field??
On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 02:54:20PM +0100, David Paleino <d.paleino@gmail.com> was heard to say:
> Il giorno Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:04:52 -0300
> Otavio Salvador <otavio@debian.org> ha scritto:
>
> > As I said, for APT, the order has meaning _always_.
> >
> > apt-get install foo bar
> >
> > Is completely different of
> >
> > apt-get install bar foo
>
> Could you please elaborate on this? I know for sure that Pre-Depends exists
> just for the cases where order _does_ matter. But I've never had problems in
> installing packages in any order (or probably I've just been lucky).
Apt by default makes an initial attempt to resolve dependencies
greedily which is a fancy way of saying that it tries to install each
package it encounters and recursively solve its dependencies. So if a
dependency is resolved by a package that's listed earlier, it'll never be
traversed; on the other hand, a package might get installed that makes a
previous choice redundant.
Using a full dependency resolver would be one way of fixing this
problem, but that tends to produce less predictable results.
Daniel
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