On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 11:24 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
This seems to be spiraling into major complexity and lots of ways for
developers to get it wrong. Boo. I've never been very thrilled with
the idea of soft deps, and I really haven't seen it done right.
I like them. I'm sure they can be abused, but for example -
perl-Readonly)
It's a perl module (am I observant or what?? ;)
Anyway - applications that use it will require perl(Readonly)
perl-Readonly gets a performance boost from perl(Readonly::XS) but does
not explicitly require it.
That is a case where using a soft dependency will help. A perl program
requires perl(Readonly) which suggests perl(Readonly::XS).
perl(Readonly) is pure perl, noarch. perl(Readonly::XS) is a binary.
If there were a problem building the binary on one or more platform, it
might not be available, so we don't want to have it be required by
perl-Readonly. A suggest though we _do_ want.
We also can't have perl(Readonly::XS) required by the perl-Readonly rpm
because that causes a circular dependency at build time - as
perl-Readonly-XS requires perl(Readonly) to build. But a suggest - the
build machine could (should) ignore suggests.
That's why it is a good thing to have suggests.