Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 3
On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 11:15:35AM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le mercredi 11 janvier 2006 à 10:10 +0100, Henning Glawe a écrit :
> > a) explicitely forbid circular dependencies in policy
>
> At the very least, I think they should be treated like pre-depends, with
> a request on this list being mandatory before adding a circular
> dependency. Until now, all circular dependencies cases I have met were
> fixable. At first, some of them looked necessary and they required quite
> some work, but they were fixable.
You know when you're adding a pre-depends. You're typing the word
"Pre-Depends" in a debian/control file.
You don't know when you're introducing a circular depends that easily,
and it could be either of the packages in the circle that shouldn't have
such a depends, not necessarily the last one that closed the circle
should change.
Now, I agree they should be avoided where possible. But I'm afraid that
needs to happen by having skilled people having dealt with similar
issues before detecting them by running repository-wide dependency
analysis on a regular basis, and then advising how to fix it. This
happens to be what's happing now, actually. It'd be nice if QA's
debcheck could be extended to detect circular dependencies and list
them. Let's start by filing a wishlist bug on qa.debian.org for that :).
#347676
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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