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Re: Complex Depends



Hi,

On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 08:21:35PM +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> An idea I have been harboring for quite some time, and which bears some 
> (though not very much) relevance to this thread, is a reverse 
> dependency. The idea is this:
> Package "wine" has wine.
> Package "kde" has kde.
> Package "wine-kde" has the wine integration into kde. This package 
> reverse depends on "kde" and "wine", which means that if both "kde" and 
> "Wine" are installed, then "wine-kde" is automatically installed too. 
> The idea is that it is installing kde and wine that triggers the 
> installation of "wine-kde".
> 
> To understand why this is useful, consider webmin. If we could make 
> webmin-samba reverse depend on samba and webmin, no one would ever have 
> to figure out whether there are any more useful webmin modules they can 
> install for their system. It would all be automatically done by 
> aptitude. Merely installing samba on a system where webmin is installed 
> will bring webmin-samba in as well, without making samba depend on 
> webmin or vice versa.

I don't think reverse-depends would be fine in such cases. One may want
to use webmin to configure something but not to configure samba. Hence, 
I think reverse-recommends would be much better.

Fortunately, reverse-recommends already "exist"; they are implemented
with the "enhances:" header. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no tool
implements them yet...


Cheers,

Nicolas

PS: please respect my MFT header: I read this list and need no CC.



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