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

[Seth Vidal]

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.

Thoughts?
Problems I'm not thinking of with an implementation like this?
Is this a solution looking for a problem? (distinct possibility in my 
mind)

-sv