Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies
On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Peter Samuelson wrote:
> Depends does not just mean "executables will crash or fail to load".
> It actually means "it is pointless to install this package without this
> other package".
I think we should not use such meaning for the Depends field.
Otherwise we could end up having control files like this:
Package: libfoo
Depends: complete-or'ed-list-of-all-packages-which-depend-on-libfoo
> [...] Perhaps there is need of a package flag that says "it is
> pointless to have this package installed by itself, so remove it if
> nothing depends on it".
We already have something for that. It's called "Section: libs"
and deborphan, and it works great.
Perhaps we should just move to section libs any package which is
useless by itself, and it's only useful in combination with others,
much like libraries, but without requiring them to be real libraries.
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