On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Todd Vierling wrote:

> ...has got to go.  Currently, perl-dependent packages are depending on perl,
> perl-base, p5-CGI, p5-Data-Dumper, etc.  So how will they cope when perl
> gets updated and these packages are part of perl-base again?
> 
> Registering only direct dependencies should be adequate -- that allows a pkg
> maintainer to specify succinctly the things upon which the package could
> function properly if dependencies were changed.

Well said.

Consider, too, that the present state of affairs, of having dependencies
in the resulting packages that are not viewable in their "Makefile"'s, is
evidently very difficult to mantain correctly, since it often isn't. I've
_never_ been able to update just "gettext" or just "ORBit" and then
reinstall all the pre-built binaries that dependend on them -- always I
have to rebuild some of the top-level packages, too. Typically, the
top-level packages never got version bumps when their _invisible_
dependencies were updated, and this is bad, because then you can have
different "versions" of a package that all have the same version
number. "gnome", in particular, is almost impossible to install from
binary packages, unless they were all built at the same time.

http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/msg.php3?msg_id=4695658&list=466


Frederick