On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 3:30 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > You suggest the scenario where just package A would be installed, and if > I happen to need some functionality of A (as opposed to some more > elementary functionality of A which would be good enough for you), I > would need to install B manually. But the features of B that are used > by A might also work in B only if some other package C is installed, so > I would need to install that manually as well. And so on... > > This chain of "optional" dependencies could continue indefinitely, and > is called "Dependency Hell". It's a very descriptive name, and soft > dependencies are not supported precisely to avoid those situations. Nope. Dependency hell is what we currently have and is IMHO the single biggest problem facing Fedora. I've filed countless bugs about excessive dependencies, and a few have been fixed. But there needs to be a systematic approach to this in the form of a policy saying "only provide the absolute minimum hard dependencies for a package". Of course, this would benefit hugely from soft dependencies in rpm, which others have claimed don't yet exist. I don't know why you think you'd need to install dependencies manually in such a scenario. Just add a flag to yum to say: yum --optional-deps install foo Hell, make it the default for all I care (which would give you the current behaviour), so long as those of us that don't want the bloat can do something like: yum --no-optional-deps install foo Fine grained behaviour like: yum --optional-deps=avahi,cups install foo would be nice, but not essential. > How can a machine know whether or not you are going to need some > functionality? You might not be the only user on the system, and other > users might need some features that you don't. The machine doesn't know. I, however, do know. I'd like to be able to tell the machine what I know and how I want it to behave. Tet -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
