[Yum-devel] soft deps(Suggests, Recommends, etc)

Tim Lauridsen tim.lauridsen at googlemail.com
Sat Sep 5 06:50:15 UTC 2009


On 09/04/2009 05:18 PM, Seth Vidal wrote:
> The request for soft deps in rpm (and in yum) has been around for 
> quite some time. If you're unfamiliar soft deps are the idea of 
> 'dependencies' which are not strict. Ie: if the dep is available it is 
> pulled in but if it is not it doesn't abort the transaction. Soft deps 
> are for pkgs which like plugins and language packs. They aren't 
> strictly required but they are useful and a lot of people may want to 
> know that they should install them.
>
> In a discussion on IRC this morning the subject came up. I was 
> thinking - what about implementing softdeps in much the same way the 
> updateinfo is imeplemented for the security plugin. An extra metadata 
> file is created with this information in it. The information is 
> external to the pkg and can change independent of the pkg updating.
>
> I thought about implementing this as a plugin but it wouldn't be too 
> hard to glop it onto the install() call and stow the information we 
> use into the yumdb so we can access it from remove() calls, too.

Sound like a good plan to keep the soft deps in a special metadata, and 
much easier to test, because we don't need to mess with spec files, 
rebuilding etc.  And the distro can control the soft deps in a central way
>
> Thoughts?
Maybe more kind of soft deps is needed.

* Normal soft deps, Adds extra important functionality (will be 
installed if available)
* Light soft deps, Addon stuff there can be useful in some cases, when 
we need extra functionality
   - EX: qgit is a light soft deps to git.
   This kind of deps will not be installed in the normal case, but can 
be useful to show related packages.
* Conditional soft deps (i10n stuff)
   - This will only be installed 'foo-dk' is a conditional soft dep to 
'bar', but only if 'lang-dk' is installed.

Tim


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