Re: Dependency problem and apt-get
On Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 11:00:46AM +0100, Richard Kimber wrote:
> Libaspell is optional for Bluefish according to the Bluefish home page.
> It certainly runs fine without it, which must be some sort of definition
> of 'optional'.
>
> However the Debian unstable package won't install properly without
> libaspell15, which is regarded as a dependency. I'm not sure how
> dependencies are defined in debian. Is this a bug that I should report?
Upstream often have different definitions of "optional" than Debian. For
example, it's not uncommon for upstream's "optional" to mean "you can
compile the package without it": that is, build-time optional. However,
if the Debian maintainer compiles the package with this "optional"
library, then it will cause programs in the package to be linked against
the library, which means that the library must be installed or the
programs will not run: that is, run-time required.
Looking at the bluefish package in unstable, I see that this is the case
here. It may be possible to compile bluefish without aspell support, but
that would require a separate package.
Is the aspell support a problem?
> Also, when I do apt-get upgrade, I get :
> Building Dependency Tree... Done
> You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.
> Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies:
> bluefish: Depends: libaspell15 but it is not installed
> E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.
>
> How do I get rid of this without installing libaspell15?
You can't. apt-get won't tolerate unmet dependencies on a system. You
can do it with dpkg, but then apt-get won't run until you correct the
dependencies, and in this case the program won't work anyway.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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