Broken FC5 packages - stay clear.

[Mike Hearn]

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:03:23 +0200, Andreas Bierfert wrote:
> Well from a wine perspective I see that this makes sense, but if you take a look
> at all the dependencies it is another story...

This is a problem with RPM and not with Wine. If RPM/yum had the concept
of optional dependencies like some other systems do then this would really
not be an issue. A better way to handle this would be to fix RPM, or
simply to not mark them as dependencies at all yet still build the
package with those features enabled. If the supporting libraries are
missing the features will be disabled at runtime usually with a message on
stderr.

The problem here is exactly the same as with Debian. This approach is
just broken and should not be used. What if the user does not know about
wine-tools and does not install it? They will be missing:

 * winecmd
 * notepad
 * winedbg
 * winepath
 * winhelp
 * _EXPLORER_

These may appear to to be optional but they are not.

Explorer is needed for shell integration, HAL support and system tray
support. It is not an end user tool, it's a part of the Wine
infrastructure.

Winedbg is needed to produce useful crash data for developers. Notepad and
winecmd are sometimes used by installers which will *fail silently* if
they are missing. Winepath is used by various third party scripts. Winhelp
is used by apps for online help, obviously.

Gah. This is just frustrating. The same mistakes are made over and over
and over again. And we are the ones who get to pick up the bugs. What was
wrong with the way Vincent did it?

-m