[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 6



On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 07:01:22AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> >  install time are indeed buggy, but I see no indication that the jihad
> >  against circular dependencies is making any such distinctions.
> 
> It that's the case, I'm not sure this is the best way to make the
> point. I'm actually following this thread and I try to understand
> whether the circular dependencies used by console-common (for which I
> act as co-maintainer with Alastair McKinstry) are Good or Bad.

During my switch to aptitude instead of debfoster/apt-get, I recently
thought that:
aptitude markauto '~i(!~M)((~R(~i))|(~Rrecommends:(~i!~M)))'
or even
aptitude markauto '~i(!~M)~R(~i)'
should be an idempotent operation. And that once this is done, I could
not mark any more packages as automatic (ok, you have to refine a bit to
hold in account the fact that recommends is as good as depends for
aptitude in default mode ; I did not include the more complicated search
for the sake of simplicity).

Once I have selected console-data to be marked manual and the rest
(console-tools, console-common) to be automatic, I expect it would
see that everything holds. Instead of that, it just finds the circular
dependency loop and says that since they only depend on themselves,
those packages are probably a useless loop.

As a matter of fact, I can live with a few exceptions. But this way
(with a more complicated search in aptitude that accounts for the
Recommends dependency) is a quick way to find circular dependencies.

On my system, there is a dependency loop for 
console-* packages, {sys,}klogd packages and
fortune-* packages, at least.



Reply to: