On Sat, 13 Aug 2011 10:38:28 +0200
Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
> >>>>> On Sat, 13 Aug 2011, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > I think we're going about this in the wrong way. We should probably
> > remove all mention of circular dependencies, and just state that
> > there's nothing except system things guaranteed for pkg_*.
> 
> Except that large parts of the tree rely on packages in RDEPEND being
> available in pkg_*.

Then those packages are broken. (And we can't ban RDEPEND cycle
breaking, since large parts of the tree rely upon that too.)

> > If there's a need for dependencies that will definitely be installed
> > for pkg_setup, we should introduce an IDEPEND (for 'install').
> 
> And then at some point we will have circular IDEPEND dependencies and
> the package manager will have to break such cycles, as it does for
> RDEPEND now.

No, IDEPEND will simply not allow cycle breaking, in the same way as
DEPEND. IDEPEND would be, in effect, DEPEND that is also honoured for
binary packages.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh