On Mon, 2008-03-03 at 10:57 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > > Is there any way of softdependencies supported by yum? Is this planned for > > the the future, for plugin basd apps it would be nice to be able to hint to > > the end user that certain optional plugins (with perhaps some hefty deps) > > would be good to install, then in beginning user mode (== default) yum > > could treat these as harddeps, and more advanced users could reconfigure > > the behavior to for example ask the user, or just not install soft-deps. > > Worth comparing what Debian do: > > http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-binarydeps > you'll note debian doesn't specify behavior. So much in fact b/c, last time I checked, apt just lists out suggests/recommends to the terminal w/o doing anything with them. Seriously - these are the hard questions to answer: 1. if foo suggests bar, baz and quux and the user is using -y in yum or using kickstart to install do we: a. automatically install them b. automatically ignore them c. something in between? 2. If foo suggest bar, baz, quux and the user has asked to remove foo do we: a. automatically remove them b. automatically ignore them c. something in between? If we do A in both cases then they're just dependencies and should be left that way. If we do B then they're nothing to the user and don't matter Now, the first question is: "But what about interactive modes, couldn't you prompt and ask the user what to do?" The problem is installing rpms is a non-interactive business and we have to have a sensible answer for the non-interactive modes before anything else. Moreover, if we have a sensible answer for non-interactive why would we bug the user to ask them what to do along the way if our answer is sensible? -sv -- Fedora-packaging mailing list Fedora-packaging@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-packaging
