[NEW IDEA] Automatic removal of dependencies

Steven Pritchard steve at silug.org
Fri Apr 28 21:09:54 UTC 2006


On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 05:50:21PM +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 08:43 -0500, Steven Pritchard wrote:
> > Stupid question, but how hard would it be for a depsolver to work this
> > out in reverse?  For example, xmms-sid requires xmms, so when I'm
> > installing xmms, notice that xmms-sid requires it, and suggest it as a
> > possible enhancement?
> 
> I've thought about this - getting the reverse dependencies is not hard
> at all, basically the depsolver could do the equivalent of this:
> 
> [root at weasel ~]# repoquery --whatrequires --alldeps perl-Kwiki
[...]
> What's problematic with this approach is that it only works for certain
> types of packages, something resembling an application in other words.
> Try it on a library and the results are probably not what you want. 

So how would you fix that?  Walk through all the file
provides/requires and all the other implicit dependencies?  And if you
did all that, how painful would it be?  :-)

> Taking perl-Kwiki as an example, it lists "Development/Libraries" as
> it's rpm group,

That's because cpanspec is hard-coded to add that Group: tag.

> it doesn't belong to any comps groups

That's because I haven't added any of my packages to comps.  (Shame on
me, I know, it's on my todo list.)

> and it doesn't look like an application in the sense that it doesn't
> put anything into your path

There's just the "kwiki" script in /usr/bin/...

> (which is a very bad heuristics anyway since many library packages
> have some utility binaries) etc. It'd be very likely to be classified
> as a library of sorts by any obvious heuristics to determine whether
> "suggests/enhances"-reverse depends logic should be applied.

Even having this available as a convoluted command involving repoquery
would be pretty cool.  :-)

> That's what Enhances is all about: the main package wouldn't have to be
> aware of those other packages, those plugin packages would just have to
> add "Enhances: perl-Kwiki".

Ah, my sleep-deprived mind was reading that backwards.  That makes a
whole lot more sense.  ;-)

Steve
-- 
Steven Pritchard - K&S Pritchard Enterprises, Inc.
Email: steve at kspei.com             http://www.kspei.com/
Phone: (618)398-3000               Mobile: (618)567-7320




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