On 15/03/2023 06:35, Robert Ramey wrote:
Right. This is a built-in deficiency of the package manager approach. Dependencies are dependent upon the actual end user application and cannot be logically discerned a priori by any package manager. Contrary to what one would hope, the package manager is not a panacia and trying to make it into one is a hopeless quest which leads to pointless efforts to "eliminate dependencias" and create "standalone" libraries.
What I imagine is part of the problem is that the package management ecosystem has grown up independently from the component authors -- so the package maintainer runs tools to see "oh, this header file is included, that must be a dependency" because they're less familiar with the *context* of that inclusion than the actual component author, and there aren't even standardized package names let alone a standardized way for the component author to indicate to package tools what things should be considered required vs. optional. There are occasional whispers of something almost like that, in the form of autoconf, pkg-config, or CMakeFiles that can list dependencies, but these aren't universal and can have complex logic based on options. And then there's distinctions between dev and runtime dependencies...