On Wed, Dec 27, 2000 at 10:38:20AM +1100, David T. Bath wrote:
> Suggestions and observations re dependencies:
> 1. Perhaps all available "rpm spec" files and/or deb equivalents could
> be available as a single tarball somewhere on gnome.org. This would
> help planning even for non-RPM non-DEB based systems : these files
> are plain text after all.
At least for the debian subdirectory, I disagree that this is a good idea.
Unless the Debian package maintainer has CVS write access, debian/ in CVS
is a bad idea. And putting it in a tarball is no help either.
Gnome's got too many hands in it for debian/* to be centrally maintained.
Also consider that Helix and Debian often seperately package things.
Which packaging do you use? I'm unsure that .spec files would be any
different really.
> 2. This does *not* address the problem of the "optional" dependencies.
> (These would include the --with-gnome-widgets and --with-bonobo for
> glade). This *might* be addressable by a tarball of the outputs
> of "./configure --help", but it is getting ugly.
In the case of Debian, there things in Debian policy for how to handle
these things, so Debian build scripts would have to take Debian's package
policy into consideration which is an unreasonable thing to ask the Gnome
developers to keep track of.
> 3. It seems to me that "dependencies" is not specific enough, perhaps
> we should have an agreed-upon method of describing dependencies as
> a) Mandatory - must be there or else
> b) Desirable - required for full functionality
> c) Optional - e.g. "--with-included-gettext", where there is no
> major functionality loss as configure might find an alternative
> way of doing the job.
> d) Experimental - purely experimental.
You're not talking about at the package level here. If you are, what
you're after is not actually possible given that libraries make up the
majority of dependencies and any linked library is mandatory or the app
won't run.
> 4. I am drawn to considering an RDBMS, particularly Oracle which supports
> a tree-structured query (using the CONNECT BY PRIOR) clause. Other
> real RDBMS tools might be able to do this. Imagine a page on gnome.org
> where you select the tool, push the submit button, the dependencies
> are selected from the database and displayed on the returned page.
> Here the option to choose the "level" of dependency (mandatory, ....)
> would be useful. Any other easy non-Oracle solutions??
[..]
What _are_ you on about? Either I'm seriously misunderstanding you, or
you're fabricating a problem to create a complex solution nobody has time
to maintain.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd debian org> Free software developer
Subject: Bug#42432: debian-policy: Proposal for CTV for Draft for Proof of
Concept for Draft for Proposal for Proposal for CTV for a CTV to decide on
a proposal for a CTV for the CTV on whether or not we shoud have a CTV on
the /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc transition now, or later.
-- Ed Lang
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