On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 01:06:14PM +0200, Jesus Climent wrote: > On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 10:17:15AM +0200, Jesus Climent wrote: > > > > What about erasing the dependency totally? > > I meant, to set the dependency on what build-essential provides: Because: A) build-essential is what you can assume is present for a *build* dependency; B) runtime dependencies are something else; C) your package may need libc headers and static libs but not the other stuff that build-essential would force onto the box. Perhaps we should re-examine why we have -dev packages that depend on other -dev packages in the first place. My assumption had been that it's to keep the linker from barfing if you're compiling a static object using the library in question. Most such libraries[1] will have unresolved symbols, very often into libc. On this theory you'd also need dependencies on -dev packages containing any other unresolved symbols. For instance, libxaw7-dev would depend on xlibs-dev because it calls into the Xlib and Xt libraries and on libc6-dev | libc-dev because -- like most code -- it uses the standard C library. Now, maybe that assumption is wrong. Evidence against it is that linking fails if you don't have a toolchain either. So my theory actually supports Jesus Climent's proposal. So, let's figure it out. What should packages containing only header files and object archives (.a files) depend on, in and of themselves, anything? [1] Andrew Suffield and I tried to make the libtwofish-dev package not have a dependency on libc6-dev, since the only C library functions it used were memset() and memcpy(), but I backed away from that effort after talking to the upstream maintainer. So let's keep in mind that even if we go with my interpretation, there may be -dev packages out there that have no reason to depend on the C library development package. Some libs have limited needs, or do everything themselves. -- G. Branden Robinson | The noble soul has reverence for Debian GNU/Linux | itself. branden@debian.org | -- Friedrich Nietzsche http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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