Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2008 mails)

[Anders Johansson <ajohansson@xxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 15 April 2009 21:06:24 Larry Stotler wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Anders Johansson <ajohansson@xxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> > It did. You even quoted it above. There was a complaint about illogical
> > dependencies on avahi, and it was fixed in 11.1
>
> Must have missed that.  Since 11.1 is not an option for me, I guess
> I'm stuck with it.  Honestly Anders, I've compained about stupid
> dependencies in SuSE for as long as I can remember.  My question is
> who decides the dependencies?  You guys who create the packages for
> the distro, or the author of the program?

Both. If the program has a hard dependency on something (say by calling 
functions in a library unconditionally) then suse packagers will not remove 
that without some extremely good reason

In some cases, a program has a "soft" dependency on something, which means 
that if it's there it will be used. Lately, rpms can have "suggests" or 
"recommends" instead of "requires" for these cases, but it's not being used 
everywhere. For avahi for example, I would think "recommends" is correct, 
since it's probably a good idea for inexperienced users to have it. But, as I 
said, it depends on the code. It may have to be rewritten to test if something 
is available before using it

Anders

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