On Mon, 01 Aug 2005 14:54:04 -0700 Donnie Berkholz
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
| Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
| | Well... What I was mainly thinking (and assuming we don't have the
| | new virtuals system by whenever this becomes relevant) is that a
| | metapackage could represent, say, "the core x11 libraries as
| | provided by xorg". This is all well and good, but there are other X
| | implementations out there. It could well save a lot of work in the
| | long term if deps were generally upon "the core x11 libraries"
| | instead.
|
| But see, that's the thing; no packages should just generally say "Give
| me the X libraries" other than temporarily. They should be
| specifically demanding upon the exact libraries they require.
Hrmmmmm. Is this going to be sanely doable by your average dev? How long
a dep string would we be having in typical cases? How about in bad
cases?
| | Is it your assumption that in the future xorg-x11 will be the only
| | serious X server?
|
| My assumption is that if there's another fork, it will be easier to
| deal with || ( xorg-libfoo forkx-libfoo ) than a virtual for every
| single package X provides.
So X deps will be by package ('either xorg-libfoo or forkx-foo or
sgi-x'), rather than by concept in the future?
| | *shrug* I realise we make similar assumptions about a lot of
| | packages, but X is a) an at least vaguely standard protocol, b)
| | heavily depended upon and c) implemented by more than one vendor.
|
| Indeed. But what I've begun to discover is that virtuals aren't always
| the best solution when there is more than one provider, much less when
| that's a largely hypothetical question.
Mmm, possibly true. For the big things though, I was hoping we could
switch more towards depending by concept rather than by implementation,
especially once we get improved virtuals. The current X situation is
sort of a concept dependency -- moving away from that could arguably be
seen as a regression from one perspective.
--
Ciaran McCreesh
--
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