Re: [Helidelinux-devel] Dependency management for software packaging

[Bennett T. <be...@ra...>]

2004-03-09T09:19:42 Hui Zhou:
> However, some dependency is a multiple choice, such as either
> glibc or uClibc. For these situations, file dependency may be more
> precise.

More informative, perhaps, but I am not inclined to try to track
that level of detail. If I build a package, it'll have build-time
dependancy on uClibc, and no install-time dependancy on libraries (I
statically link). If you build the varient of the package that you
find tasteful (editing LDFLAGS in the spec file's build node)
perhaps you'll end up with both build- and install-time dependancies
on glibc, build-time on glibc-devel and install-time on glibc.

> For running dependency, one has to break common package apart,
> such as devel package, doc package, etc.

One has to, if one chooses to. I choose not to; instead, I use as
few shared libs as possible (so packages that provide libs are
generally only the "-devel" package), and I plan on partial installs
to leave out bits that aren't needed on small dedicated servers.

> I am thinking for some small dedicated system, can we enumerate
> each executable with ldd to find out the runtime library
> dependency?

That can certainly be done, it's the most important technique rpm
uses, it's a valuable heuristic. I'll probably end up including
that, as well as #! analysis, as special-cases.

> Bennett proposed using strings, which may be a better solution.

Less positive than ldd and file (#!) analysis, but more inclusive;
in particular, strings analysis can pick up dependancies on other
programs that are execed, on data files like /etc/termcap, etc.

-Bennett