Who makes these decisions???

[scottro]

Sigh, this is one that I had to laugh.

Booted a rawhide that that hadn't been updated in days, and blithely went to upgrade it. So, about a million things to download, all fail--because chromium requires bug buddy. WHO THE *** (note to other mods--only 3 asterisks, not 4, so I'm clean) decided it needs bug buddy. WHO NEEDS BUG BUDDY FOR ANYTHING ANYWAY????

Sheesh. I bet it's Adam's fault. :D :D

All goofing aside, it's for gnome. I don't have gnome. Of course, it's a Gnome idea if it breaks things. :) (I'm with Goedel on Gnome).

Anyway, I feel better now.

Fedora and RH really do load down programs with dependencies that are not needed for operation of the program. I would say that 90 percent of the time I get something that won't install because of a failed dependency, if I download the rpm and install it anyway with nodeps, it works.

(Note to newcomers who come across it--doing that with --nodeps is almost ALWAYS a bad idea--I get away with it because I'll be familiar with a specific program and what it should actually need, as opposed to what RH thinks it needs. Also, even knowing that--note that I said 90 percent of the time, which means that the other ten percent of the time, it fails miserably.)

Whimsically (now that I've vented---see Bob, I told ya this forum is a good idea)

yours


PS, I added "meaningless rant" as a tag--I *like* that one.

[bob]

Oh come on now! Bug Buddy is essential so that you can have your bugs automatically ignored, instead of the lengthy process at Bugzilla. :D

[scottro]

Ok, Bob, that was pretty funny. Not necessarily fair, as you well know, but awfully darn funny.

I would bet money though, that if I find the rpm and install it without bug buddy, chrome will still work. :D

[hotdog]

Yeah, Fedora's dependencies can tend to err on the overly cautious side, shall we say. This usually trips me up the other way round, when I'm trying to uninstall something that I've decided I don't want anymore. There have been so many times when I've trying to remove something seemingly unimportant only to be told by yum that that's fine, I'll just have to remove Gnome, X and all your other applications too...

Ever tried removing the at-spi Assisted Technology Service Provider Interface because you don't plan to use screen readers, magnifiers, etc? You'll have to remove gdm, gnome-session, gnome-panel, control-center, etc., etc. to do so. Want to remove gnome-pilot on the grounds that you don't actually own a Palm Pilot? Sure, but you'll have to do away with Evolution and the Nautilus send-to plugin as well.

I suppose checking that dependencies are genuine and removing unnecessary ones has a very low priority with devs (compared with sorting out missing dependencies, anyway) as superfluous dependencies don't break things as such. Sticking a bunch of dependencies in 'just in case' may be OK in most situations, after all modern HDDs are enormous compared to the size of any conceivable Linux installation so what harm is there in having a few packages you don't really need installed? That doesn't really help weirdos like me trying to cram a full blown general purpose Linux distribution into a tiny netbook SSD though ;-) Or people with slow and/or quota capped internet connections who end up having to download loads of updates for packages they never even needed to install in the first place.

[RahulSundaram]

Hi,

Dependencies are not added just for fun. Package maintainers usually add them for good reasons and they are the people responsible for making such decisions. Chromium does have a explicit dependency on breakpad (developed by Google) and bug-buddy is the way to expose it. I would note that it is for good reasons not available in the official repo yet. Bug buddy is obsoleted by a program called abrt in rawhide with goal of integrating the crash reports in a better way so that they are not ignored. Abrt is already fairly successful in that.

There are many different things to consider for dependencies:

a) It is a genuine dependency which is not obvious:

One of the important checks we do while reviewing a new package is to check whether the dependencies make sense. In some cases, it is not obvious why those dependencies exist but that doesn't make them superfluous.

b) It is a build time dependency

Many of dependencies such as AT-SPI is a build-time dependency. Meaning that you can as a package maintainer choose to not use a library or a feature while building the package (which would result in disabling all the accessibility features in the case of AT-SPI) but once you have build with it, you cannot remove it anymore. Naturally, Fedora considers accessibility a important feature and they cannot be removed.

c) It is a "optional" feature

While some other distributions like SUSE and Mandriva have patched RPM to specify some sort of soft dependencies, the semantics are not defined and causes confusion. For example, should kickstart installations include soft dependencies or not? RPM roadmap iirc does include soft dependencies, part of which would include considering all the different use cases and defining the semantics and dependency resolver behaviour cleanly.

d) it is a bug

This is simple. It is a packaging mistake. While these do exist, they are fairly rare. If you find one, report it to bugzilla.

e) more granular package split

if there are good reasons to split up a package, report it via bugzilla and the maintainers typically do respond to it in a positive way. i do this fairly often (deltaiso is a separate package from deltarpm in rawhide based on my report for example) and been very successful in doing so.