Re: [gentoo-dev] Reminder on dependencies.

[Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@gentoo.org>]

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On Tuesday 25 October 2005 08:01, Spider (D.m.D. Lj.) wrote:
>
> actually, I'm not in agreement here. If I install libfoo, be it from
> binaries or source, I certainly expect to be able to use libfoo, and
> that includes being able to build software against it,  things I work
> on myself, other sources, or sources from Gentoo.
>
> We can hack around the later by being fanatical with our own DEPEND
> tracking, for the other two, our tree will remain completely broken.
>
> This is a case where we, a source based distro, is actually a crappier
> development platform than any of the current binary distributions.

I agree with Spider here. DEPEND in package x to me means what is needed 
to make x build. RDEPEND in package x means what is needed to use package 
x. There are various uses of x. One is running said package, another one 
is building some other package (say y) against it.

This last meaning (building y against x) might have been put in a separate 
dependency variable. This however is not so usefull as we have the 
current format. But putting that meaning in DEPEND would mean that 
portage would certainly need to merge all build time dependencies of a 
package x to merge y. As such packages like virtual/jdk, autoconf, 
automake might be unneededly pulled in.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Researcher
Mail: pauldv@cs.ru.nl
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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