Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>]

Hi!

I'm writing this, because the situation with forced dependencies is
still sad even after several years of therapy.

If you add/update a spell, please take 10 more minutes to inspect its
core dependencies: laziness of not doing so hurts our quality as a
distro A LOT! It breaks updates (especially when it's a spell like
libffi), forces to install up to one hundred more spells for no reason!

Remember: when you force anything for no real reason it does always
look like you're doing this:

# cd /var/lib/sorcery/codex/stable
# echo "depends firefox" >> kernels/linux/DEPENDS

please stop.

1a. for autotools-based spells there are configure.ac and configure.in
files to check for optional/required dependencies
1b. for cmake/scons/whatever build systems you can find according
"control" files
2. there are README/INSTALL files to read too
3. there's almost always official documentation on the
project/github/whatever page with detailed instructions and
dependencies: optional and not optional
4. there are still distros with respect of dependencies -- some of
them use optional (like Gentoo, FreeBSD) and forced (Arch, Slackware,
OpenBSD) -- inspect their package databases to compare with what have
you just done.
5. use ldd/readelf and grep .h/.c source files to find #if's, #ifdef's
and other selectors to detect optionality of dependencies.
6. always separate dependency classes: required, optional, runtime,
suggest as carefully as possible -- use the power of Sorcery!

thanks!

--
Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>

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