Re: A proposal to improve dselect
On Wed, 8 Jan 1997, Philippe Troin wrote:
>
> On Wed, 08 Jan 1997 15:42:27 +0100 Gertjan Klein (gklein@xs4all.nl)
> wrote:
>
> > One of my most serious criticisms is the fact that in spite of the
> > dependencies being known, packages aren't installed in the right order.
> > If package 1 depends on package 2, then package 2 *must* be installed
> > *first*. This isn't done; I consider this a bug, that should be
> > reported.
>
> Not a bug. What you describe is pre-dependencies. It's a bit too long
> to explain here, but you can find all the details in the Debian
> policy manual.
> Dpkg does the work right... so far.
>
> Phil.
I beg to differ, but dpkg has not been doing the work right on my
system. Indeed if you read the install reports being posted,
you'll see that the "fix" for many instllation problems is to
reinstall the broken package as its depended upon package was
probably installed after it. gcc, perl, some parts of the libc
stuff (don't remember which or what) gagged on me. In dselect it
was too easy to fix to care about it (despite its bad wrap about
the interface, dselect really does kick ass), so I don't have any
specifics.
I think Gertjan is right. Pre-dependencies are only for packages
that rely on a fully functional (i.e. unpacked and configured)
package in order to install. Dependencies on packages that are
required for the package to run (but not required for
installation) should not be pre-depended upon. These are just
standard depends.
Although largely this works out OK, I have seen some problems on
my system with it and have certainly seen enough reports here to
agree with Gertjan. I think that Dale and someone else (maybe
Manoj?) are working on dselect back end type stuff that addresses
this ordering issue. That would take the burden off of dpkg to
do this when the new back end is in use anyway.
Thanks
Richard G. Roberto
richr@bear.com
011-81-3-3437-7967 - Tokyo, Japan
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