[Slackbuilds-users] Clarification of REQUIRES and dependencies

[Luiz Carlos Ramos]

Not really aware of the whole context, and so what is written below
could be completely wrong, but...

I think what's really missing is a quick tool to be used to list all
dependencies needed for building one given package. Having such tool,
for a "casual" user, it would not matter how REQUIRES is implemented. Of
course developers would adhere to a common way of doing regarding this,
but it would match to that tool's implementation.

Just my 2 cents...

Luiz



On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 03:13:01AM -0600, Kyle Guinn wrote:
> Willy and I have a disagreement about this line of
> http://slackbuilds.org/guidelines/
> 
> "The content of REQUIRES should only be first level dependencies (i.e.
> no deps of deps)."
> 
> The disagreement occurs when package 1 depends on packages 2 and 3,
> and package 2 depends on 3.  Should 3 be listed in 1's REQUIRES?
> 
> It's similar in context to overlinking/underlinking for libraries.  If
> you don't know what that is, these two pages describe it with
> examples:
> https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Overlinking_issues_in_packaging
> https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Underlinking_issues_in_packaging
> 
> I am interpreting this guideline as "Do not overlink", as in don't
> list the entire tree of dependencies, just those with a depth of 1
> ("first level").  Willy is interpreting it as "Underlink wherever
> possible" (similar to the indirect case on that second page) and will
> remove a depth=1 dependency from REQUIRES if it happens to appear at
> some depth > 1 (a "dep of dep").  What is the original intention of
> that guideline?  Can that sentence be updated to distinguish these two
> interpretations?
> 
> Possibly a more important question:  Does it matter?  Are there any
> SBo tools out there that need the dependency info to be underlinked?
> Are there any tools that would benefit by not underlinking, or are
> broken by underlinking?
> 
> Personally I like having all of the dependency interrelations
> available to me, to know how all of the packages depend on each other,
> and I hate having parts of it stripped out to meet Willy's
> interpretation or some specific tool's needs.  If some tool needs the
> underlinked info, then that can be automatically generated from the
> complete info -- that's what we have computers for, right?
> 
> I'd love to hear other opinions and use cases.
> -Kyle
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