Don Armstrong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: >> [Ian Jackson] >> > The only argument I've heard against circular dependencies as a >> > general rule is that they can trigger a particularly stupid (and >> > probably not very hard to fix) bug in apt, >> >> You seem to have missed the argument that packages with circular >> dependencies are impossible to install and configure in the correct >> (dependency) order, and thus will end up being installed and >> configured in a nondeterministic order instead. It is documented >> that dpkg try its best to find a sensible order for the packages, >> but it is bound to fail one way or another if two packages really do >> need each other to be configured before they are configured. > > Packages which have circular dependencies and depend on the other > package being configured are buggy; at most they can depend on the > other package being unpacked. Since there is no way to specify this > kind of dependency, Depends: is as close as you can get.
It seems to me that the solution in such situation shouldn't be a circular dependency with its "nondeterministic" behavior, but instead to separate one of the packages into two. For example if package b needs package a unpacked, but not configured, separate package a in a-data and a-therest, where a-data provides all that package b needs: Now b can depend on a-data, and a-therest can depend on b. Regards, Frank -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
