On Feb 1, 2008 7:03 AM, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de> wrote:
>
> - Are software maintainers willing to provide the information in a
>   formalized way? That would mean they had to understand the details
>   of the formalization, and also had to maintain these data (e.g.
>   respond to users who find errors etc.). Depending on how much detail
>   the formalization can express, this can be very easy or tricky.

Personally, I would be enthusiastically happy to provide such a description.

> - Is this so useful for the users that they really need it? I mean
>   the primary users would be the existing distribution systems
>   like GODI or Debian that already have formalizations for deps.
>   I expect that most end users won't directly install software,
>   and if so, it is likely that they run manually through the
>   the build package by package, so a description of deps in English
>   would be almost as useful as a formalization.

I have seen many, many cases where the dependency information compiled
by non-developers is just awful.  I've seen packages that depend on
Firefox (and want me to build it from source!) because the software
uses HTML help files.  I recently installed KOffice on OS X using
MacPorts and got a chuckle when I learned that gtk2 was a dependency.
It would be much better if dependencies were specified by the
developers directly and the packagers used that info.

Cheers,
-n8

-- 
>>>-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
>>>-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->