Re: If *-module depends on *-utils, should *-source recommend it?

[Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com>]

On Wed, 2005-01-12 at 18:28 +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:

> Scripsit Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com>
> 
> > What's interesting is nobody has jumped in on this thread to point out
> > that dpkg *has* a dependency field for forcing checking of dependencies
> > before the package is unpacked.
> > 	Pre-Depends
> 
> As far as I read the thread, this is not exactly what is being asked.
> 
> My immediate thought, too, is that it would be sensible for dpkg to
> start by checking whether all dependencies of the packages it is being
> asked to install *will* be available after everything is finished,
> 
dpkg is designed so you don't need to do this.

> I can certainly accept and anticipate the objection that "that would
> be difficult to implement, and nobody has cared to", but I still don't
> see why such a behavior would be *wrong*, per se.
> 
It's breaking elegance to fix something I'm not convinced is a problem.
All of the examples given so far are bogus, there simply isn't a
situation I can see where upgrading a package would prevent you from
being able to get its dependencies and install them afterwards.

And a far better solution to the "a package on disk needs dependencies"
solution is for a command-line tool that can grab the dependencies a
package needs, not just bitch about them not existing.

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?

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