Rant - Arch Package Maintainers

Arch Linux pulls in LOADS of dependencies for applications which really don't need what it's pulling in, why it does this, I don't know. But it's not Pacman which is at fault, it's the way the packages dependencies are listed.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Arch
• Rant
• Arch Linux Sucks
• Linux
• Techsnap
• pacman
• gtk-qt-engine
• Arch Linux

[22ness0hayden]

It's funny because "the arch way" is supposed to be the opposite of this! LOL

[Techsnap]

@22ness0hayden Yes, this is exactly why I made this video, I don't know how they can say it's lightweight when the package managers just decide to pull in every dependency under the sun.

[tjwoosta]

Maybe instead of ranting about it you could modify some PKGBUILD's and submit them to AUR ;-) gtk-qt-engine-crapless :-p

[Techsnap]

@tjwoosta I don't use Arch, I just thought I'd bring it to the Arch users attention.

[tjwoosta]

@Techsnap I actually just noticed that the gtk-qt-engine-svn package in aur already has sane depends. If only the maintainers would change the one in the normal repos.

[Techsnap]

@tjwoosta Yeah the AUR ones are usually good, I just don't know why the Arch Package Maintainers have to be so ignorant, it's the number one reason that I don't use Arch, even Ubuntu/Debian has cleaner dependencies than Arch. Sure Disk space is nothing now but you've got to draw the line because one day they might pull in Gnome with KDE because you might need it, you know what I mean?

[adamsfusion]

That's like rebuilding your car to change an air filter.

It's a weakness of pacman.

[chrisxy123]

Have you tried filing a bug?

[dinobotpwnz]

Some controversial decisions get made when the package maintainers refuse to host packages that are even partially broken. Only 1% of the libgnome users cared about the gnome-open binary but when improper functioning of this binary was noticed, they made libgnome pull in gvfs which pulled in all the disk shit that only 1% of gvfs users cared about and so on. Gstreamer is bad for that too. It bundles a gconf dependent piece that only 1% of gstreamer users care about.

[RKS00]

Don't like it? Recompile it youself. Too much work? Go bark at some other tree or RTFM.

[hakkai153]

For the wine package it might be installing the full wine which needs lcms, jack, and etc. On Debian that is fully optional. As they are broke up into packages such as wine-lcms wine-sane wine-print. You just need the basic wine binaries and you can add extras (such as alsa, opengl) with the other packages.

[PirateOfLoserville]

It doing things backwards somehow. if you issue pacman -Rs [target] + dependencies. I really wish pacman would complain what package is needed, and let the user decide. At this point you can list no needed dependencies with pacman -Qdt. But if pacman install all this junk to begin with, it will probably not take that to account when listing, unfortunately.

[Linux4UnMe]

strange that... tried it on Mandriva and it only pulls in 2 deps....

[Salemboot]

Debian’s one developer to one package idea fails.

During the build process of software the configure script will announce versions of software necessary to compile the application. Nobody is making notes to later put in the dependency file for the deb, rpm, pac whatever. If they were?

Slackware recognized it's almost impossible to keep track of millions of iterations of dependencies.

[coolkehon]

just use abs if you want a custom build, when they compile (build) the package they include stuff that people uses most often, otherwise everyone would have to recompile just to get common features that most users use.