fewer dependencies
Friday, 14. November 2008, 02:37:11
A couple of minutes ago I received an email notification about #479427 being closed:
Being very interested on the subject I went to incoming.d.o and downloaded the -gecko and -webkit versions of epiphany, which were both listed in my packages with most dependencies top 20.
So yes, the number of dependencies dropped from 55 and 58 to 27 and 32, accordingly
Should dropping the number of useless dependencies be a RG for squeeze? we'll see.
Note: I'll update the post as soon as the i386 packages are built, because the number of package dependencies of my previous blog post were calculated from i386's Packages, not amd64's.
Oh, and of course many thanks to Josselin Mouette for working on the issue.
#479427: epiphany-gecko: please reduce the number of dependencies by avoiding linking to some libs
...
* Pass --as-needed to LDFLAGS. Closes: #479427.
+ Introduce 99_ltmain_as-needed.patch.
Being very interested on the subject I went to incoming.d.o and downloaded the -gecko and -webkit versions of epiphany, which were both listed in my packages with most dependencies top 20.
$ countPkgsDeps.pl epiphany-*_2.24.1-1_amd64/control
epiphany-webkit:27
epiphany-gecko:32
So yes, the number of dependencies dropped from 55 and 58 to 27 and 32, accordingly
Should dropping the number of useless dependencies be a RG for squeeze? we'll see.
Note: I'll update the post as soon as the i386 packages are built, because the number of package dependencies of my previous blog post were calculated from i386's Packages, not amd64's.
Oh, and of course many thanks to Josselin Mouette for working on the issue.
WIDGETIZE
Anonymous # 14. November 2008, 03:57
fewer.
Anonymous # 14. November 2008, 06:24
It would be nice if the upstream build systems could be fixed to not link against libraries that are not used.
PS: your host sucks, they want me to accept 2 cookies just to view the site.
Raphael # 14. November 2008, 18:29
I'm sure upstreams would welcome patches. No, really, I know --as-needed is just a workaround.
Anonymous # 15. November 2008, 10:32
Hm, definitely a bug you should fill against upstream. Another big problem are libraries which don't resolve their own dependencies so the program which links against it has to resolve them. dpkg-shlibdeps will then warn that the program does not use any of the symbols of libxyz and you should fix the problem - but the program uses libimportant which uses libxyz (but doesn't link against it). This is a bug of the build system of libimportant and must be addressed by libimportant.
There are some bugs about that problem on Gentoo-Bugzilla: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246757 but they seem to be confused about that bugs.