Distributions going smart & bugfixes?

[Michael Jennings]

On Friday, 09 January 2009, at 08:29:26 (+0200),
Axel Thimm wrote:

> The ancient PreReq (by now replaced with modern Foo() syntax) and
> friends tags were designed to reorder such loops/collections. At the
> very least when these came into play a million years ago it was a
> "feature, not a bug".

Again, not really true.  And to be pedantic, tags cannot eliminate
loops.  They can only clarify that loops do not exist (e.g., that
libtermcap does not itself require /bin/sh, and thus there is no
libtermcap/bash loop).

> Probably depends on what rpm branch you're talking about - since
> rpm.org is used in Fedora 10 and the latter is using more and more
> such dependency loops/conglomerations it would be quite funny if the
> Fedora rpm developers wouldn't notice killing their coworkers work.

Well, there is only 1 "Fedora rpm developer," and I'm pretty sure you
were referring to the "Red Hat rpm.org developers."

Regardless of the errors Fedora packagers make, there is really no
such thing as a dependency loop that is not inflicted by a packager.
(Otherwise, bootstrapping would be impossible.)  And I don't recall
running into too many loops that couldn't be corrected by proper
packaging, resulting in cleaner and more accurate RPMs.  Or any,
actually.  But then, my memory isn't what it used to be.  :-)

Michael

-- 
Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX)  http://www.kainx.org/  <mej at kainx.org>
Linux Server/Cluster Admin, LBL.gov       Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org)
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