On Tue, 3 Jun 2008 09:49:13 -0400 (EDT), Mike Burger wrote:
Hi,
While looking through the updates mail, I saw something that sounded
intriguing, "hamster-applet." Did a yum info query on it, then thought I'd install it to have a look. But it wanted to drag in a ridiculous number of dependencies, most of them devel packages.
Surely a precompiled non-devel RPM shouldn't be dragging in development
packages? That's got to be a major design screw up. Doesn't
incorporating a package into a repo involve some sort of checking
procedure to reject packages trying to do that sort of nonsense? (Non-devel packages depending on devel packages.)
Yes, the initial review before a new package is accepted into the Fedora Collection. But later on, the packager can update the package without needing any review. Usually that's when packaging bugs return into the package.
<snip>
Quite often, those -devel packages have library files included on which the non-devel package depends.
Uhm, exactly *that* would be a packaging bug. ;)
Packages that depend on the kernel-devel packages spring to mind, but many others do, as well.
Many others? Hopefully not. Here it's:
--> Processing Dependency: evolution-data-server-devel >= 1.4.0 for package: gnome-python2-evolution
Summary : Python bindings for interacting with evolution-data-server Description : This module contains a wrapper that allows the use of evolution-data-server via Python.
# rpm -qpl gnome-python2-evolution-2.22.0-4.fc10.i386.rpm /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/evolution /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/evolution/__init__.py /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/evolution/__init__.pyc /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/evolution/__init__.pyo /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/evolution/ebook.so /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/evolution/ecal.so
It contains an explicit dependency on
evolution-data-server-devel >= 1.4.0
without a comment in the spec file.