On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 05:14:09PM +0100, Miroslav Suchı wrote: > Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 17:14:09 +0100 > From: Miroslav Suchı <msuchy@xxxxxxxxxx> > To: packaging@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: Soft dependencies guidelines > User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 > Thunderbird/31.3.0 > > On 08/25/2014 12:29 PM, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > > On 08/25/2014 12:20 PM, Miroslav Suchı wrote: > >> Hi, > >> rpm 4.12, which include soft dependencies landed in F21. > > First of all, we would need to have a list of precise, detailed definitions of these "soft dependencies" to build up an > > opinion. > > Resurrecting this old thread. > > The description is here for some time: > http://www.rpm.org/wiki/PackagerDocs/DependenciesOverview#Weakdependencies > > I acknowledge that Recommends and Suggests can be problematic now because DNF and PackageKit is not ready yet. > > However I think allowing Supplements and Enhances in Fedora is perfectly safe. It does not replace any existing Tag > (while Recommends/Suggests may replace Requires). If software handling the rpm with these tags do not know how to handle > it and ignore it, then it will behave exactly as now. So there should be no regression. > > And it can provide us with some real data for soft dependencies for DNF/PackageKit, while keeping Fedora safe. > > Later when frontends are ready we can finally allow Recommends/Suggests > > Comments? > > Unless I get some negative feedback, I will prepare Guidelines Draft. I for one am not fond of these statements WRT weak dependencies: Weak: By default the dependency solver shall try to fullfill them. So installing a package containing Recommends: foo should make the depsolver also select a package either named foo or containing a Provides: foo. A packages containing Supplements: foo on the other hand should be added if a package named foo or containing Provides: foo is installed. Why not? Let's suppose I strongly believe in minimizing the size of my installed system (I do). In that case I don't want these "recommended" packages. It's useful to see the recommendation, and it's useful to have an option for the depsolver to install them. However, imho the default should be to install only the minimum necessary to install what I asked for. IOW the default should be to NOT install weakly-recommended dependencies or else have a config option for yum, et. al, to override the default behavior. - paul -- Paul Morgan <jumanjiman@xxxxxxxxx> RHCE, RHCDS, RHCVA, RHCSS, RHCA http://github.com/jumanjiman -- packaging mailing list packaging@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging
