Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 4
On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 02:51:59PM +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
>Le Mer 10 Mai 2006 14:40, Brendan O'Dea a écrit :
>> On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 10:49:36PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
>> >Here the lists of packages involved in circular dependencies listed
>> > by maintainers.
>> >
>> > perl
>> > perl-modules
>>
>> These two packages are meant to be installed together, split only for
>> arch any/all.
>>
>> I'm a bit puzzled as to why this is a problem, since this particular
>> dependency exists in sarge and as far as I no caused no upgrade
>> issues.
>
>cycles are evil, so when you can avoid them, it's better, and here ...
A specific problem, rather than a vague description of "evil" would
help.
>> Note that the dependency expressed is not exactly circular, since the
>> perl-modules dependency on perl is "looser" than the inverse. Don't
>> know if this matters for the problem you're trying to fix.
>
>perl-modules should not depends on perl. It's useless to have only
>perl-modules installed, but this create no harm.
>
>moreover people just apt-get install perl, so that won't break anything.
That would be true if perl depended on perl-modules (= current-ver).
The current dependencies are used to allow a slightly newer version of
perl-modules to be installed: porters had issues in unstable where perl
was uninstallable due to the package not having built on an
architecture.*
Simply having perl depend on perl-modules (>= current-ver) is more
problematic than the case you describe, since a sarge user may upgrade
just perl-modules 5.8.4-x to 5.8.8-y, retaining the older perl package
and things would go pear-shaped.
--bod
* ISTR some discussion about modifications to the archive suite which
would keep binary packages from the same source package together on a
per-arch basis, which would resolve this particular issue.
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