On 06/22/2009 10:14 AM, Dan Williams wrote: > It's also a question of maintainability. Sure, we could split up tons > of packages and add code to all the tools to check runtime-availability > of every tool they might use. But that's just insane, and increases the > maintenance burden tremendously. This is roughly what Gentoo does, right? Of course, Gentoo has the 'luxury' of re-compiling. But that just gets at, I think, that vanilla c isn't flexible enough to handle this dynamically. A Python app could do it pretty easily, IIRC. In that case, a Python implementation of a thing could conceivably compete for mindshare against the c version, given the inherent trade-offs. One could imagine Feature: and Feature-Requires: tags in a spec that could be used to generate more complex dependency trees and automatically generate the proper set of package-foo.rpm files. Integrating this with yum and/or graphical package managers would certainly be a ton of work. But to get to the thematic question, probably nobody (for large values of nobody) cares if any given package has a 40KB dependency. It's when you have a thousand packages that have a thousand unneeded dependencies, you increase the cost (time, disk, memory, cpu, bandwidth, electricity, complexity) to install, update, etc. and you wind up excluding very small computing devices in some cases. I agree that making humans manage this would approach insanity. But does that necessarily preclude allowing computers to handle it? -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 http://www.bfccomputing.com/ Cell: 603.252.2606 Twitter, etc.: bill_mcgonigle Page: 603.442.1833 Email, IM, VOIP: bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
