[Bug-freedink] Re: About package dependencies..

[Sylvain Beucler]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 04:50:05PM -0700, Petteri Tolonen wrote:
> Sylvain Beucler wrote:
>>
>> OK. Do you think it would worth also adding 'timidity-eawpatches' as a
>> dependency?
>
> I don't think users should be forced to install eawpatches, because  
> there are other patchsets available too. What if I included a post  
> install message that would recommend installing eawpatches? It's also  
> possible to use 'optdepends' in PKGBUILD, but I have never seen anyone  
> use it in AUR and don't really know how it works.

OK. Maybe it works like Debian's Recommends (installed only if the
packager is configured to treat them as dependencies) or Suggests
(just bring the user's attention to the package without any action).

>>>>     - You can depend on 'sdl' directly even if there's an indirect
>>>>   dependency via sdl_* packages, as it's directly used by FreeDink
>>>>         
>>> Replaced dependencies: sdl_* -> sdl.
>>>     
>>
>> Uh, I meant "in addition to the current dependencies".
>> sdl
>> sdl_gfx
>> sdl_image
>> sdl_ttf
>> sdl_mixer
>>
>> :)
>>
>>   
> I somehow misunderstood you, but now I don't see why sdl should be a 
> dependency. In my opinion 'depends' should only contain first level 
> dependencies. sdl_gfx, sdl_image, sdl_ttf and sdl_mixer depend on sdl, so sdl 
> is installed anyway as a dependency. I put the dependencies back to the way 
> they were before.


OK, in this case this isn't important at all.

I'll use another example to explain what I meant though, because I
don't want any misunderstanding :)

Let's imagine that FreeDink uses libfreetype6 (fonts library):

- directly: e.g. analyse font metrics and compute a windows-compatible
  font size (which is something that we may need later, currently the
  size is hardcoded for the default font only)

- indirectly: through SDL_ttf, which uses libfreetype6 to render the
  font in pixels

I only need to specify 'sdl_ttf' as dependency, because it already
depends on libfreetype6. Specifying 'libfreetype6' as a dependency
looks superflous.

However, I'm relying on an implicit dependency, which is bad
practice. Indeed, if tomorrow SDL_ttf uses a different font renderer,
then libfreetype6 won't be installed along with SDL_ttf, and FreeDink
won't compile. So I took the habit to always specify direct
dependencies.

There's a similar issue with C #include.


In this case, it is unlikely that SDL_image will stop relying on SDL,
so specifying 'sdl' or not doesn't matter ;)

-- 
Sylvain