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

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com> writes:

> 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.

Lets construct a case:

foo 1.0 does *not* depend bar
foo 2.0 depends bar
bar pre-depends foo

and update it:

foo 1.0 is installed
dpkg -i foo_2.0.deb
foo_2.0 is unpacked but unconfigurable
bar is uninstallable


Ok, it is a constructed case and bar is uninstallable unless you are
updateing but there are more complex cases to the same effect.

> 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.

Both can be done.

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

MfG
        Goswin