Re: Indirect dependencies
On Sun, Apr 26, 1998 at 01:14:51PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> pkg-order depends on perl.
> perl pre-depends on perl-base.
> perl-base pre-depends on libc6.
>
> Does this mean pkg-order should really depend on libc6?
> I don't think so.
No. That's because pkg-order doesn't depend on libc6; it depends on perl
which does. If you have an old version of perl that uses libc5, pkg-order
will work just as well with that.
This isn't what people mean when they talk about indirect dependencies.
Suppose I rewrite pkg-order in C, but still use perl for some bits. I could
leave the dependencies as they are, and it would appear to work, but if
someone installed a different version of perl that didn't depend on libc6,
there could be problems due to pkg-order not depending on libc6 itself.
If the thing indirectly depended on is only needed by direct dependencies of
a package, that's fine, and no-one has ever said that it isn't. What isn't
OK is if a package relies on an indirect dependency for something it needs
directly itself.
> What does this mean? Well, it just means that indirect dependencies do
> really *exist* and not in all cases it is a good thing for them to become
> direct dependencies.
Yes. Who has ever said otherwise?
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