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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