Re: Incoming directory status
On Sat, 11 May 1996, Alan Eugene Davis wrote:
> Although I am not a developer, let me state my objection to the idea
> of leaving miscellaneous minute packages around upon which various
> major packages are dependent.
Emacs and XEmacs would *not* depend on a ctags-etags package (since they
don't need it to work properly). 'Suggest'ing it would be enough.
> This kind of confusion currently surrounds a number of the libraries,
> for which I am almost stunned---I am not even certain which packages I
> need to install until I try to install something.
Huh? First install all the libraries (lib*.deb usually) in base, you don't
have a choice about these... Then doesn't the 'Depends' line give you the
list of *all* the packages a given package needs in order to run? And
"dpkg -l foo bar" will tell you if you have packages foo and bar installed.
And if you still don't want to deal with that by hand, that's what dselect
is for.
> Far better, if some subtlety and intelligence is built into the
> scripts, so that, for example, I am not only informed of conflict
> between config files of xemacs (which I may never use) and emacs, but
> also given the option of installing them under the current name or
> another name (in case such a script actually noticed the presence of
> the other package---and, by the way, what's the problem with doing
> that anyway?).
I'm not sure I parsed that paragraph correctly... But
a) Emacs and XEmacs conflict because of common *binaries*, not config
files.
b) You use emacs and not xemacs? Other do the exact opposite and I don't
think it's our role as distribution maintainers to 'take sides'.
c) The 'subtlety and intelligence' for resolving conflicts (as you say)
between packages is built in dselect. Use it if you want 'subtlety and
intelligence'. Dpkg is meant for people who know what they're doing.
Christian
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