Circular dependencies in RPM

[Petr Pisar]

On 2014-08-25, Miroslav Suchý <msuchy at redhat.com> wrote:
> Or we can wait for F21, which will have weak dependencies in RPM. And
> I anticipate that weak dependencies will break a lot of circles.
>
Does Fedora have guidelines what should and what should not be a weak
dependency?

My experience with Perl packages is that "declaring dependency because it's
recommended but the package works without it" is quite seldom. The
majority of build cycles are either build-time dependencies for tests or
hard run-time dependencies (the Perl module exits with an exception
without the dependency in some code paths.)

In my opinion, it would be much more appreciated if Fedora had
a mechanism to express "I want support for PDF" on the installed system
and then package manager would use this boolean to install or skip
affected dependencies. (This is the case of "some code paths" from
previous paragraph.)

-- Petr