On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 04:39:24AM +0200, David Weinehall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 06:32:54PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > > Steve Greenland wrote: > > > This really seems like something that while they may, very occasionally, > > > be required, are mostly unnecessary and often misused. > > > > Rather, I'd characterise it as a feature that is necessary for any > > general-purpose depencency-based system to be complete[1], which is > > totally safe and does not adversely affect any aspect of the system > > if some simple rules are followed, and which, if used incorrectly, is > > still orders of magnitude safer than other dpkg features, such as its > > support for setuid files, or its support for postinst scripts that run > > arbitrary code at install time. > > Well, if foo depends on foo-data, and foo-data depends on foo, I find > it really hard to see the point of splitting the two into distinctive > packages...
I can see two common cases: - Huge arch independant data. If you put that in the arch dependant package, that clutters the archive. I did that for xulrunner for example, with a libxul-common package. - A single source package providing several binary packages using the same set of data. apache2 does that with apache2-mpm-* and apache2-common. I both cases, the circular dependency would be useful to avoid installing the common data without the software. Consequently, when you apt-get remove the software, you don't get an orphan data package. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
