Re: Suggestion for next Debian release
On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 02:54:39PM -0600, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
| * dman (dsh8290@rit.edu) spake thusly:
| > On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:56:19PM -0600, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
| > | Ok, now bitchx depends on xutils, who in turn suggests xfree86-common,
| > ^^^^^^^^
| > | who in turn depends on libaxw and so on (THIS BOX HAS NO FSCKING X!!!).
| >
| > It is a sugggestion, not a requirement.
|
| Must be a brain fart: I'm sure it was "Suggests: xfree86-common" when I
| looked at "packages that depend on xutils" in aptitude. Now that I checked,
| xutils actually *depends* on xfree86-common.
Oh, Depends and Suggests are quite different.
| Besides, that wasn't my point. I was referring to all those useless
| libraries that get installed "because somebody might want to
| * run $foo in xterm
| * authenticate HTTP requests against mysql database
| * etc."
|
| I'm sure it sounded like a reasonble idea at the time, but when
| $foo depends on $bar who depends on $baz and so on ad nauseam, the
| whole thing will get FUBAR eventually. All it takes is a little bug
| somewhere in the middle of dependency tree, and you'll see apt
| downloading 10GB of packages you didn't want while purging the ones
| you did want "to satisfy dependencies".
It is a tricky balancing act to find the minimal set that works, yet
still be fully functional and not extraordinarily difficult to get
more. There is a reason I haven't upgraded apache in quite a while.
-D
--
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to
look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from
being polluted by the world.
James 1:27
Reply to: