Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies

[Ondrej Sury <ondrej@sury.org>]

On Fri, 2005-06-24 at 22:59 +0200, Olaf van der Spek wrote:
> 
> 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.

If you want to play word games and not apply common sense, then I would
say that foo-data package has functionality to provide data to foo and
so it's broken without foo package.  You must realize that 90% of these
packages are games and only reason for foo + foo-data is to not split
out arch independent data out of foo package so it doesn't get
replicated for each arch.

One thing is very clear:

1. this is (a sort of) abuse of Depends field
2. we need reverse Suggest/Recommends field, ie. something like
Recommends-Uninstall: foo-data

(well, same can be applied to -doc, -common, etc.)

Truth is that deborphan is very nice tool to do this...

Ondrej.
-- 
Ondrej Sury <ondrej@sury.org>