Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1188 mails)

[Roger Luedecke <roger.luedecke@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2012-01-20 at 16:09 +0000, Dave Howorth wrote: 
> Brian K. White wrote:
> > I'm not really claiming this is a suse problem. It's been a linux
> > problem for years. Some developers have everything under the sun
> > installed, and use functions from anywhere indiscriminately, and you end
> > up with what should be dinky little programs that require 300 megs of
> > gnome stuff all because they used something dumb like a base64 function
> > that happened to come from some gnome library.
> >
> > This is a non-specific general rant. Do not take it as a call for any
> > specific action.
>
> The only way to solve the problem, I think, is to explicitly test for
> it. I mean, it would be nice if developers would think about
> dependencies, which I'm sure some or even most do, but even good
> developers make mistakes.
>
> I wonder if it is possible to use some sort of smoke test rig to test
> for this condition. I guess the problem is that you would need some sort
> of facility for each package to say what it didn't expect :(  But maybe
> it would be possible to automatically install each package on a minimal
> system and return the actual dependency list to the maintainer for checking.
>
> In this case, it looks like libgcj45 has an unreasonably large
> dependency list. But I haven't messed with Java for years, so I don't
> have a clue whether it's easy to fix.
Reminds me of installing Skype in 12.1. It pulled the ENTIRE Gnome
desktop as a dependency when I installed using the package kit pickup
from the browser. Installed fine using YaST.

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