Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies
Le vendredi 24 juin 2005 à 17:21 +0200, Bill Allombert a écrit :
> I see two easy case:
>
> 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.
>
> 2) libfoo and foo-bin, where foo-bin include binaries linked with
> libfoo. Usually libfoo only need to Depends on configuration data
> in foo-bin and not on any binaries linked with libfoo (to avoid infinite
> recursion). In that case it should be possible to split foo-bin in
> foo-bin and foo-common, and change libfoo to depend on foo-common
> instead.
How would you treat the librsvg case? Currently, librsvg2-2 and
librsvg2-common both depend on each other. The librsvg2-2 package
contains the library, and librsvg2-common contains a loader that allows
gdk_pixbuf to load SVG files.
* librsvg2-common needs to depend on librsvg2-2 because it links to the
library;
* librsvg2-2 depends on librsvg2-common because most applications
linking to librsvg2 also expect the SVG loader to be available.
Similarly, how would you treat the fontconfig case? Currently,
libfontconfig1 contains the library, while fontconfig contains the
shared configuration and support binaries (including fc-cache).
* fontconfig depends on libfontconfig1 because it links to it;
* libfontconfig1 depends on fontconfig because the applications using
libfontconfig1 are almost unusable if fc-cache isn't run in the font
directories.
The libgtk2.0-0/libgtk2.0-bin case is very similar: without running
update-gdkpixbuf-loaders, applications using libgtk2.0-0 won't work.
The gconf package contains a daemon that links to libgconf2-4. However
applications linking to libgconf2-4 will require that daemon to be
installed. The same holds for libgnomevfs2-common/libgnomevfs2-0.
In short, there are cases where circular dependencies are needed. Fixing
the problem means fixing the tools, not the packages. (Which doesn't
mean we shouldn't fix packages when it's possible; the GNOME
panel/session/nautilus/control-center mess was fixed, for example.)
--
.''`. Josselin Mouette /\./\
: :' : josselin.mouette@ens-lyon.org
`. `' joss@debian.org
`- Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom
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