A question about dependencies

Hye-Shik Chang perky at i18n.org
Tue Jun 29 21:22:57 PDT 2004


On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 01:03:04PM +0900, Alexander Nedotsukov wrote:
> Michael Nottebrock wrote:
> >
> >Yes, but this is a buildtime dependency. Python is not needed by libxml2 
> >or libxslt at runtime, so there should be no RUN_DEPENDS on it.
> >
> By default libxml2/xslt installs two components C library and Python 
> bindings. Python is an inpterpreter wich is *run-time* required to use 
> bindings mentioned above. Moreother if python will hit API breakage (.py 
> file format change whatever else) run-time dependency cearly show that 
> those bindings outdated and need to be updated. So everyting good as it 
> is now.
> Peahps port split for C library and bindings (py-libxml2/xslt) proposed 
> by perky@ will make things better.
> 

There's yet another bad scenario if we just drop runtime dependency.

1. python 2.3 is installed.
2. libxml2 is installed over it.
3. python 2.3 is upgraded to python 2.4.
4. although libxml2 is installed, python won't be able to import
   libxml2 module because site directory is changed[1] and ABI for
   extension modules is also incompatible between python 2.3 and
   2.4.

[1] $PREFIX/lib/python2.3/site-packages ->
    $PREFIX/lib/python2.4/site-packages

Hye-Shik


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