Re: removing useless dependencies

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2015 at 08:58:42PM +1200, David Sainty wrote:
> I think what you are saying is that the problem is not so much with the
> implementation of alternatives, but is with the potential and sometimes
> actual inconsistency of behaviour between installations, some of which may
> be using one alternative and some using the other.  So, regardless of
> whether alternatives do a useful job [which I think they do at least in
> theory], the cost of supporting them is not worth the benefit?

Kind of. The Perl patterns essentially assume that the version of Perl
will be higher than the version of the module. Otherwise, the Perl part
would be just ignored. There are other cases where the situation isn't
as easy. That is, where the intended dependency is not what is picked
up. A simple case are packages like PHP, where multiple versions are in
the tree and sharing the same base name. Without the noise from the Perl
packages, it would be much easier to find cases where a package says it
wants foo/bar, but gets foo/baz. Often enough, the problems only really
start further down the build due to conflicting installations.

Joerg