Rick Moen suggested:
> That's nice, but what I said was that, on a piece of software's Web
> site, I expect to see an accurate list of dependencies. Not names
> of RPMs, but rather the specific software depended upon.
I think package dependencies rate even lower than documentation for most
developers. Modules get included because they might be useful, but then get
ignored because there is something better. Or a shortcut is used to get
functionality out of a lower level library that really should come from a
more specific library. After a while it all gets very messy.
The easiest way to determine dependencies is to delete all the libraries and
add them back one at a time to find out what breaks. But this can be a very
tedious process and for most programmers is non-productive work, similar to
a visit to the dentist.
The best way to solve the problem is by design: breaking packages into
logical units with logical dependencies. Easily said, much harder to do.
Like the GNOME team has shown, this problem will come back to bite you. I
can't really blame them, because GUI's always seem to involve horrendous
dependency trees, no matter what the architecture. :)
- Matthew
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