Re: xlib6g now depends on xfree86-common (?)
Hi,
On Tue, Feb 09, 1999 at 04:44:44PM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
> It has come to my attention that the new xlib6g base now depends on
> xfree86-common.
>
> I think this dependency is artificial, because of two reasons:
Santiago, I really hope you are not proposing to remove that dependency.
Did you take a look at xfree86-common's filelist?
* A bunch of directories. Some programs don't work if those directories
doesn't exist. Which programs? The programs that depend on xlib6g. I
honestly don't know if the situation has changed or not since the last
time I saw this.
* /etc/X11/Xsession and /etc/X11/Xresources/. The first one loads the
resources. There's some code in xlib6g to use X resources.
* A few _important_ docs. If a program depends on xlib6g it's because it
will use X somehow. If it uses X, I HOPE the user is willing to READ a
few docs. If they don't read the docs, it's their problem, we can't do
anything about that.
> * The purpose of a library is to satisfy the dynamic linker for those
> programs who need it. Since xfree86-common does not contain any library
> on which xlib6g is based, the dependency is not needed by xlib6g.
Except in a handful of situations, X won't run at all if xfree86-common is
not installed. That dependency is the most straighforward solution.
> * This dependency creates *indirect* dependencies on xfree86-common from
> all the packages which depend on xlib6g.
You got it. It creates a dependency of the X Windows System on that
package. The closest thing to an "X Windows System" package is xlib6g.
(The other solution is to merge xfree86-common back in xlib6g, where it
lived for a long time, but why do that? You have a very nice binary-all
pacakge there)
Marcelo
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