Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies

[Olaf van der Spek <olafvdspek@gmail.com>]

On 6/24/05, Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org> wrote:
> 
> [Bill Allombert]
> >           The `Depends' field should be used if the depended-on package is
> >           required for the depending package to provide a significant
> >           amount of functionality.
> 
> I'd say if a -data package is useless without its corresponding binary
> package, that fits this definition just fine.  Policy does not specify
> *why* a package might fail to provide significant functionality without
> the presence of something else.  (Unless you wish to argue that -data
> packages provide no functionality, which seems a pretty arbitrary
> definition of 'functionality'.)

I'd argue for exactly that.
What functionality would you say a data package provides?

It's the other package that provides the functionality, not the data
package. The data package shouldn't even have to know about the other
package.