Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies

["John H. Robinson, IV" <jaqque@debian.org>]

Bill Allombert wrote:
> 
> 1) foo and foo-data. There is usualy no reason for foo-data to depend on
> foo. foo-data does not provide user-visible interface, only data, so it
> does not need to depend on foo.

Fully agree. Looking at one of the circular dependencies listed on
http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out I chose amphetamine{,-data} as
an example.

The list of files for amphetamine-data shows everything is in /usr/share
except /etc/amphetamine/{amph,user}.conf. I do not know enough about the
game to know if the configuration file is more closely related to the
binary, or to the dataa itself. I would venture to guess that the conf
files are more closely related to the game's binary.

I can see where the game would be installed on the client system, and
the data would live on the file server under /usr/share. Currently, the
only way to do this is by having installed broken packages, and to copy
the /etc/amphetamine files from the filer onto the client.

vim and vim-common seem to suffer the same, except vim-common has
nothing outside the /usr/share directory. In my case, though, I would
likely have installed vim onto the filer, also.

-- 
John H. Robinson, IV          jaqque@debian.org
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