Re: XEmacs 21.0b46, Packages
>>>> SL Baur writes:
John W Jones <jj(a)hobbes.la.asu.edu> writes:
> I sent a patch many moons ago to fix this problem. In some sense
> packge-get-update-all does not currently do the right thing. It
> uses package-get-all which fetches dependent packages. This is
> bad since someone may intentionally not have a certain package
> even though it is declared as required by a package they do have
> (e.g., vm is not really needed to use efs). Fetching of dependent
> packages should be done at the time a user initially gets a
> package.
The real problem is that you're trying to fit a square peg into
a
round hole, unfortunately we don't have the round peg done yet.
The dependencies as currently listed in the package-info files and
collected into the package-get-base.el file are bytecompile-time
dependencies. There may or may not be a run-time dependency. In
the case of EFS and VM there is a sort of degraded-mode -- so long
as you never use the VM support in EFS you don't need to have VM
around. The same is true for Gnus and RMAIL.
I agree that it may not be a perfect fix, but it makes things less
broken. It would be good to have a more robust dependency system, but
currently we don't.
Most of the time, there is no reason to check dependencies at update
time. It would only be important if a new version of package X now
requires package Y. I think we will see much less of that than we
currently see of the multiple download problem.
John Jones
jj(a)asu.edu