On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 11:08:05PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote: > Hello Steve,
> I am concerned that the situation you mention is quite common and resolving it > this way will lead to a marked increase in the number of circular dependencies > in Debian. > Even in such situations, there are various ways to avoid the circular > dependency. > The first way: odbcinst1debian1 shlib could look like: > libodbcinst 1 odbcinst1debian1,odbcinst > This way every package linked against odbcinst1debian1 would also depend > on odbcinst, alleviating the need for odbcinst1debian1 itself to depend > on odbcinst. Doesn't actually work now that unixodbc is using .symbols files instead. I'm not sure if there is a syntax that can be used to achieve this with .symbols; I'd be willing to look at this option if it can be done, but it also requires rebuilds of all the reverse-dependencies to ensure odbcinst gets pulled in, so the odbcinst dep would have to remain on a transitional basis for upgrades. > The second way: Add a new package odbcinst-config that contains the > configuration files and set up the dependencies as follow: > odbcinst -> odbcinst1debian1 -> odbcinst-config I don't think I can come up with anything better... and I don't think those ways are good enough. I'm particularly not going to create a separate package just for the config files, I already feel bad about having to split odbcinst into its own package. Circular dependencies aren't bugs - policy doesn't prohibit them (it actually describes how they're handled), dpkg knows what to do with them, and these packages will install correctly since only one of them has a postinst. So while circular dependencies aren't really desirable, I think they're the least evil in this case. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ [email protected] [email protected]
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