On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 8:58 AM, Miroslav Lichvar <mlichvar@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What do you think? Are loops something that we should try to avoid? generally speaking...yes..make a reasonable effort to avoid loops. But that isn't a strict requirement. If a maintainer fills there is a good reason to have a loop, then they can do it. But we should probably ask them to document that reason in the spec file when they are making a deliberate decision to form a loop. Though I will say that loops that involve docs or devel subpackages are probably packaging errors and you could probably get them fixed up by talking with the maintainers. I would be surprised if a docs or devel subpackage was intended to be required with the main package. the -libs subpackage situations.. im not sure about. I think its case by case. Does kde3base-libs need kde3base? I dont know. Does oddjob-libs need oddjob? For the -libs circular loops I think some might be packaging errors and some might be deliberate choices. We should probably try to get the maintainers to make spec comment in the cases where its deliberate. the -data situations are probably deliberate, as a way to make sure that an application cleans up after itself when uninstalled. For the more complicated situations in your groupings.... that's definitely going to be case by case. I'm pretty sure the Xorg sitaution is deliberate to ensure some basic hardware support is installed. Things are broken out modularly as packages so individual drivers can be updated without pushing the whole Xorg tree as an update, but we still want some basic driver support always installed..hence the circular deps. But the zlib loop? It touches so many packages I'm not sure it could be deliberate decision. Can we avoid it? I don't know...it would require the maintainers of all the packages in the loop to talk about it. It is a bit of interesting analysis. -jef -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
