Darrin Thompson wrote:
On Sun, 2005-01-23 at 17:00 -0500, Jeff Johnson wrote:
The specific difference is that dependencies marked with "missingok" are passed to
a depsolver, which is entirely at liberty to do whatever it wants with the information.
And the other difference is that rpmlib is responsibly only for passing the information
to the depsolver, and then ignoring the dependecy.
That definition is well defined mechanism, unlike Recommends: et al.
You've made the "definition" easy to implement but left the whole
question of what the user can expect to happen undefined. Choosing not
to define is clever, but it isn't the same as defining something.
"missingok" may be superior to the Debian headers, but calling it well
defined is a poor argument, at least based on what you've said here.
OK, so call the scheme "implementable" rather than "well defined". <shrug>
Unlike Suggests: Enhances: Recommends: which all cater to user expectations, and have never been well implemented, even in apt.
"Not implemented." has never stopped user expectations before, "missingok" will be exactly the same.
73 de Jeff
