Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:23:08 -0700
> Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@g.o> wrote:
>> Could someone explain why manually doing work is better than 
>> automatically detecting the deps? This sounds like an argument
>> against automation, and I'm not following it.
> 
> Sometimes the magic will be wrong. For example, packages that have
> a .zip file in SRC_URI but that don't unpack that file (say, if they
> install it into sharedir as-is instead) don't need a dep upon unzip.
> 

Couldn't the ebuild be wrong?  For example, if the package manager uses 
fancy-unzip-replacement to unzip packages, but the ebuild depends on 
unzip, then wouldn't it fail?  It seems like we're trying to have 
ebuilds DEPEND on something that in reality the package manager is doing.

Shouldn't the package manager depend on unzip instead?  If circular 
references are the problem, then wouldn't it be better to find a better 
way to handle circular references (ie more specific ways of defining 
dependencies)?

The advantage I see with automagic PM dependency calculations is that 
the PM is the program calling unzip, so the PM ought to be able to 
figure out whether it needs to call unzip.