hi, peter, thanks for the detailed info from your perl-packaging days.. very helpful and interesting.. particularly, i wanted to respond to-- Peter C. Norton wrote: > Because it's not ever "finding" anything on the filesystem. ldd picks > up the hint int the binary that it needs a library. rpm checks it's > database to see if something that has that symbol is in its > database. If it doesn't match, then rpm can't help you. If you want > interbase to be an optional component, then you have to either > completely disable the dependancy check, 1) yes.. well, this is what i was *trying* to do, and thus why i wrote here in the first place.. i had disabled the auto-dependency-checking at *build-time* (via 'AutoReq: no'), so that libgds.so would not even get included as 'required' (i.e., i believe this means ldd would not get run). when i disabled auto-dependency checking, this DID make rpm happy (so 'rpm -i php-interbase-5.0.4-10.4.i686.rpm' DOES now work).. but the problem as originally stated was that even though i can now install it via raw rpm, i *cannot* install it via yum: yum *still* stumbles on the dependency at install time even though it was supposedly 'taken out' (via 'AutoReq: no') at build-time. so i was wondering how yum could still 'see' it at install time when rpm (at install time) did not. and, i cannot figure out how to disable whatever it is that yum is doing (its own dependency checking) -- even though rpm (at install time) does not do it. 2) secondly, it does seem kind of odd to me (but admittedly my knowledge of rpm is very small) that rpm (i.e., rpmbuild) uses ldd to check binaries for dependencies at build time, but at install time, rpm does not try to use ldconfig (or some such) to see if, when it cannot find the file in its database, whether it still is on the system anyway, and will serve the purpose.. it seems a bit 'asymmetric'.. but that's just my from-the-hip 2-cents.. probably would change that opinion with a little more info.. :/ thanks, jeff
