Re: [gentoo-dev] New PDEPEND behaviour.

[Vlastimil Babka]

Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> Well, I should point out where I come from. There is no need to install a pure
> runtime dependency before the ebuild pulling it in. If pure runtime
> dependencies would be handled this way, there would be no need for PDEPEND at
> all. I consider the current way Portage handles pure runtime dependencies
> (causing the need for the artificial PDEPEND in the first place) as
> conceptually broken.

There are uses for it:

A: RDEPEND="B"
B: RDEPEND="A"

Here you really don't need PDEPEND because in current portage, pure 
runtime dependency indeed doesn't have to be satisfied before the ebuild 
pulling it. But consider this:

A: PDEPEND="B"
B: DEPEND="A"

Here you can't use RDEPEND instead of PDEPEND, because DEPEND="A" says 
the package must be merged in a working state, thus *with all its 
RDEPENDs* and thus it would cause circular deps. PDEPEND is a way to 
relax this for such cases.

If this is what you call RDEPEND conceptually broken, then sorry for 
useles try to explain it :) Maybe package manager could be smart enough 
and relax the RDEPEND in such cases itself, maybe it's better to say 
that via PDEPEND explicitly...

-- 
Vlastimil Babka (Caster)
Gentoo/Java
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