-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Another idea... let's call it "meta" or "virtual" packages... Make empty packages that pull several dependencies using their Requires tags to make packagers' life easier. e.g. Name: meta-c++-devel Version: 1.0.0 Release: 1 Requires: make libtool autoconf automake gcc-c++ Requires: libstdc++ libstdc++-devel libgcc glibc-devel (empty files, empty %setup, empty %build, empty %install) Note that such a "meta" package should be arch-specific (not "noarch") because it could be that on some architecture you need different packages than on others (e.g. an x86-optimized assembler would be included in the "meta-c++-devel" package on x86 and x86_64, but not on ppc or s390). That way, when packagers need to "BuildRequires" the C++ development environment for another package, it's just a matter of: Name: libfoo++ Version: 3.4.5 Release: 39 ... BuildRequires: meta-c++-devel ... SUSE's y2pmbuild already partly offers that functionality by expanding "virtual" names in "neededforbuild" to a set of real dependencies, but the issue with that approach is that it works only when using y2pmbuild. The solution above would work with any package manager (yast2, smart, yum, apt, ...) and with any RPM building frontend (rpmbuild, y2pmbuild, abuild, ...), and could even easily "hide" the gory details of what packages are required on 10.1, 10.0, on 9.3, ... to have a specific environment (e.g. on SUSE < 9.2, it's "libjpeg" whereas on SUSE >= 9.2 it's "libjpeg libjpeg-devel"). Mauricio "netmask" Teixeira and I talked about that idea, as Mauricio told me that Connectiva has that approach with so-called "task" packages (task-c++-devel, etc...). They also use it to do the same as SUSE Linux' "selections" (*.sel files in yast2 repositories), e.g. "task-mail-server", but that's a different story ;) I could really use such a "meta-gnome-devel" package ;))) cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ <pascal.bleser@skynet.be> <guru@unixtech.be> _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDpnsEr3NMWliFcXcRAq2rAKCV2t6NNCaNW4R7LBr0tZS98ONIWwCgptY0 CGMefs6HAWaP0Djcd6v1cCc= =ptnB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----