[pkg-kde-talk] kdelibs4c2a <-> kdelibs-bin circular dependency - advice requested

[Christopher Martin]

Hello,

As you're aware, there exists a clear circular dependency between 
kdelibs4c2a and kdelibs-bin. The binaries in kdelibs-bin link to the 
libraries in kdelibs4c2a. kdelibs4c2a has libraries which work extremely 
closely with the binaries in kdelibs-bin. Moreover, extremely few KDE 
packages depend on kdelibs-bin directly. They all assume that it gets 
pulled in by kdelibs4c2a, and during operation they do all assume that the 
binaries in kdelibs-bin are available, i.e. without kdelibs-bin nothing 
works.

So this makes the circle seem unbreakable, since re-uploading every KDE 
package, making them all depend on kdelibs-bin manually, would not be 
pleasant.

One solution would be to eliminate the kdelibs-bin package, merging it into 
kdelibs4c2a. But this violates the general practice of not shipping 
binaries in a library package, so there would have to be some general 
understanding about what we were doing before any such merge, to avoid too 
many later complaints, etc. (kdelibs4c2a is already a massive collection of 
libraries, and isn't really designed to allow clean side-by-side installs 
of different KDE versions in the same hierarchy, so I don't think we'd lose 
too much flexibility in practice, but still...)

But is this really necessary? You dealt with KDE woody --> sarge upgrade 
issues. How much of a problem is the kdelibs circular dependency? Any 
advice or suggestions on how to proceed or what to keep in mind would be 
welcome.

Thanks,
Christopher Martin
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