Cleaning up dependency hell

Mike A. Harris mharris at redhat.com
Sun Aug 24 18:39:45 UTC 2003


On Sun, 24 Aug 2003, Florian La Roche wrote:

>> I think 2 really cool things that the REALLY open development model can 
>> do is help organize Bug Triage days and also help point out and fix all 
>> these silly dependency chains. Maybe help rewrite spec files that create 
>> truly minimal packages that do not pull in extra dependencies.
>
>I am just looking at some of the build dependencies. Things get easily
>out of band. Perl requires dos2unix, elfutils require sharutils etc.
>
>A bit bigger problem is the growing dependencies of libs.
>pam, openssl, openldap, tcp_wrappers, some GUI libs, kerberous and
>a couple of addon libs get easily added and the mix seems to get
>even bigger all the time.

Another problem, is that dependancies often get added, but rarely 
removed when no longer needed.  Granted, the majority of deps are 
usually permanent, but there are some cases in which a dep is 
needed, gets added, then in the future the dep is no longer 
neede, but gets kept and forgotten about.

It'd be a long hard tedious project to try to automate checking 
all of these, or even to do it manually.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat





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