Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 6
On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Ian Jackson]
> > The only argument I've heard against circular dependencies as a
> > general rule is that they can trigger a particularly stupid (and
> > probably not very hard to fix) bug in apt,
>
> You seem to have missed the argument that packages with circular
> dependencies are impossible to install and configure in the correct
> (dependency) order, and thus will end up being installed and
> configured in a nondeterministic order instead. It is documented
> that dpkg try its best to find a sensible order for the packages,
> but it is bound to fail one way or another if two packages really do
> need each other to be configured before they are configured.
Packages which have circular dependencies and depend on the other
package being configured are buggy; at most they can depend on the
other package being unpacked. Since there is no way to specify this
kind of dependency, Depends: is as close as you can get.
Don Armstrong
--
It has always been Debian's philosophy in the past to stick to what
makes sense, regardless of what crack the rest of the universe is
smoking.
-- Andrew Suffield in 20030403211305.GD29698@doc.ic.ac.uk
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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