Re: [gentoo-dev] Reminder on dependencies.

[Spider (D.m.D. Lj.)]

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 22:51 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
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> Spider (D.m.D. Lj.) wrote:
> | Why? Because they just install the hard RDEPEND, so if you have a system
> | installed from binaries, you get working linking, but nothing will
> | compile for the system.
>
> Right, until you actually install the build-time deps. Not unexpected or
> surprising after thinking about it.
>
> | Theese level of inheritance bugs are a ripe minefield for the whole
> | distribution, and one that will severely damage the distribution as a
> | whole.    one way of solving it is to go through each and every
> | top-level application and violently scan all its included files, and all
> | files included from those headers in turn, in order to get the
> | dependencies right.
> |
> | The other is to fix the level closest to the breakage by making sure
> | that headers are treated like libraries.
> |
> |
> | Hope I'm making this clear enough, its fairly early.
>
> So there's a harder but more technically correct solution (specifying
> includes as DEPENDs where necessary), and an easier but not as correct
> solution (considering build-time dependencies as run-time dependencies).
>
> At least that's how things look from my perspective.

actually, I'm not in agreement here. If I install libfoo, be it from
binaries or source, I certainly expect to be able to use libfoo, and
that includes being able to build software against it,  things I work on
myself, other sources, or sources from Gentoo.

We can hack around the later by being fanatical with our own DEPEND
tracking, for the other two, our tree will remain completely broken.

This is a case where we, a source based distro, is actually a crappier
development platform than any of the current binary distributions.


//Spider

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