[wpkg-users] ++Mailshell: Re: Question about depends and chain

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Simon,

simplesi wrote:
> Could I suggest that when you have some spare time :) that wpkg is modified
> to use "include" as well as "depends" in profiles.xml and then "depends" in
> profiles
> is documented as depreciated and then removed in a later version.


I don't see a reason for that at the moment and it does not add any benefit to
us. On the other side this would have some negative effects:

- It adds unnecessary code to WPKG
- Depreciation will not be taken into account by 3rd party tools (some of them
are lazily managed)
- The effect of "depends" in both packages and profiles is documented
- It would add testing complexity since both XML nodes would have to be tested


So for the moment I do not plan to change the depends functionality in profiles.

When I read the messages posted to this list there are very few messages about
issues with profile dependencies, so I think people well understand how to use
it. Introducing a change here is likely to create more confusion.

However we might think about this for one of the next major releases - but I
really hate to break backwards compatibility or to increase migration effort if
there is no strong reason to do it. Interfaces (like our XML definition) have to
be as stable as possible.

br,
Rainer