maintaining minimal

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2013-09-28 at 04:38 -0400, Felix Miata wrote:

> That statement in conjunction with behavior I've observed seems to indicate 
> hard dependencies have been created for what on other distros would be 
> suggests. e.g., 'yum install konsole' results in 1 package plus 190 dependent 
> packages to be installed, among them:

That kind of vague approach won't get you anywhere when it comes to
dependencies. The web of deps between a repository of over 10,000
packages is, naturally, insanely complex, and if you just say "I think
this is too many dependencies!", no-one's very likely to do anything
about it, unless they happen to be annoyed by the same dep chain and
actually do the work to figure out what's going on.

A better approach is to go in and figure out exactly what the dep chain
is, and see if you can identify the questionable links in it. Or just
establish to your satisfaction that, even though it seems weird, it's
valid, and there are good reasons for each set of deps. Usually the
maintainers are not idiots, and don't just throw dependencies around for
no good reason. If you do find something, post to devel@ or file a bug.

There is often a trade-off to deal with when deciding whether to make
something a dependency - where, say, you expect that half the users will
have a bad experience if it's not installed, but the other half will
complain about bloat if it is, what do you do? Soft deps could help with
this, but the Fedora package management folks have been opposed to them
for a long time. They have some valid reasons; personally I'm pro-soft
deps, but it doesn't look like it'll happen soon.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin DOT net
http://www.happyassassin.net