[vorbis] RPM dependency rant

[John Morton]

On Thursday 14 February 2002 18:44, Doug McNaught wrote:
> John Morton <jwm at plain.co.nz> writes:

> > libcurl is part of the curl package. It's used by ogg123 to handle
> > streaming, and it was necessary to have a recent version installed
> > to build ogg123 last time I built it from source (I believe this has
> > been acknowledged as a build bug, as streaming isn't necessary for
> > most of what ogg123 does).
>
> Right.  I ended up d/ling the source RPM from the curl homepage and
> building it--no problems.

I did roughly the same for Debian stable.

> > libasound is the ALSA driver library interface, but I'm not sure
> > whether it's for the pre0.5 or post0.5 version of ALSA - which is
> > important, because the API is quite different between the two, and I
> > think libao can be built for one or the other, but not both.
>
> Yeah, real curve ball there.  Since stock Red Hat doesn't have ALSA,
> why is it enabled in the libao RPM?

RPM's are built for any distro that uses RPM as a package manager, which 
would include at least Mandrake and SuSE (who sponsor ALSA development, so I 
guess they must use it). Of course, as it's optional, it doesn't need 
to be a dependency.

> > Strictly speaking, you shouldn't _need_ those libraries, so you could
> > force the installation.
>
> I don't like doing that if I can avoid it.  ;)

Gee, I though RPM users would add --nodeps as a relfex action, by now :-)

> Another nit--the libao RPM won't build because it tries to compile
> against 'arts' by default.  For some really bizarro reason, the
> include file that the arts plugin wants (artsc.h) is not included in
> the stock RH 7.1 (or 7.2) RPM.  At least that's where I assume it
> sbould be.  So with a little spec file hacking, I disabled arts, got
> everything to build, and installed happily.

arts is usually part of KDE so if it's not in it's own package, it's in one
of the kde ones. I think you'd have to grab it from the KDE site directly for 
Redhat, but it would come with Mandrake as standard. Again, an optional 
dependency for libao, and the configure script should be just left to 
autodetect it.

> My only complaint (and it's a small one) is that what's distributed as
> "Red Hat compatible" RPMS on the download page should actually install
> on a stock RH system, which they don't.  I have to think that's
> frustrating some potential users.

Yeah, fair enough. RPM has always tried to make it easy for developers to 
turn their packages into RPMS, which made a lot of sense back in the day, but 
in practice, relying on tools like the automatic dependency generator to get 
it right usually just forces the users to figure out what the real must have 
versions are, and what's really optional. Add the expectation that a given 
RPM should install on any system that uses RPM and you can see the mess we're 
in.

Every day that I'm force to burn in dependency hell on a Redhat system makes 
me love Debian more and more...

John

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