bmeurer@fwdn.de (Benedikt Meurer) wrote :

> Statically linked software wouldn't be a problem, as they don't need the
> libraries at all once linked, you mean shared libraries instead?

Well, yes and no, there were a little mess in my head when I wrote
this :-)

An I think there is no bijection betwwen static/dynamic and hard/weak
dependancies ...

The actual problem is that all dependencies are traeted equally.

- a shell script does not bother if an executable binary it calls is
changed, provided its cli does not change.

- a binary executable may or may not be affected by a dependent
program's change, it depends on wether the API changes or not.

Actaully, I have seen on my boxes that more than 75% of the dependencies
a "make update" recursively deletes (*) are unnecessary.
But "make replace" is not an option, since there are the remaining 25%

I cannot right now exhitbit in my boxes a "pkg_info -R" output with weak
and hard dependencies, but I'm pretty sure there are.

What should be interesting, at least in a first place is to show them in
pkg_info, so one can decide, "OK I go for make replace" or carefully do
a "pkg_delete -f, then make reinstall"



(*) whith the potential problem that a poorly written PLIST could
delete/overwrite an extremenly complex, and ATML (**) not backuped,
configuration file.

(**) According To Murphy's Law

-- 
Xavier
http://www.freetibet.org
http://www.tibet.fr/