Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies
* Petri Latvala (petri.latvala@realityescape.net) [050624 17:57]:
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 05:30:08PM +0200, Ondrej Sury wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-06-24 at 17:21 +0200, 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.
> >
> > This is usually used as way how to also uninstall foo-data when you
> > uninstall foo.
> >
> > But I agree that this is just cosmetic compared to problems created by
> > circular dependencies...
>
> It is an abuse of the Depends field. foo-data doesn't *need* foo for
> its own operations. Nothing in -data fails to execute without foo
> (because there's just data, nothing to execute). If the Depends is
> there to make foo-data automatically uninstalled when foo is
> uninstalled, then trust aptitude to do its dirty deeds. Or maybe we
> need a new field for that purpose that only has effect on uninstalls, like
> Uninstall-with: foo
Uninstall-with is perhaps a bit bad.
However, Depends has two semantics
* Need the package during run-time
* order of configuration
Perhaps the first one should be available by itself as field "Needs".
Cheers,
Andi
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