[Mageia-dev] How broken are RPM dependencies allowed to be?

Wed Dec 14 08:49:15 CET 2011

On Wednesday, 14 December 2011 04:04:39 Liam R E Quin wrote:
+> On Tue, 2011-12-13 at 16:31 -0800, Dan Fandrich wrote:
+> > I raised a bug ticket on drakxtools (#3731) because the RPM in Cauldron
+> > installs without complaints in Mageia 1 but won't work there because
+> > it requires a newer version of perl.
+
+This is unsupported. Maybe you should instead contribute documentation that 
+makes this more explicitly obvious, but it is a well-known rule in Mandriva 
+and Mageia (and usually applies to other distros as well).
+
+If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be a need for backports ...
+
+> > The perl dependency in the
+> > RPM is listed as "perl-base" when it should really be something like
+> > "perl-base >= 5.14.2" (Mageia 1 ships with version 5.12.3).  The response
+> > I got was that such an upgrade (from release to Cauldron) wasn't
+> > supported and this bug was likely a wontfix.
+
+Installing packages individually from one release on another release is not 
+supported. Either upgrade the entire distro first, or stick to packages from 
+the version you are on. However 'upgrade from release to Cauldron', when done 
+correctly, should usually work as expected.
+
+> It's really hard to test for dependencies like this, as the person
+> building the package will have working versions of everything.
+> 
+> Worse, in two years' time, perl-base of 5.14.3 will be hopelessly
+> outdated (we all expect, at least). So it becomes one more thing to
+> maintain.
+> 
+> But it's also a problem worth solving for some of the system-critical
+> components such as perl, urpmi and drak*. I don't think "wontfix" is a
+> good answer here.
+
+But, in supported use cases, urpmi *does* ensure that all the pieces to keep 
+urpmi are upgraded in one transaction.
+
+Supporting the use case of installing any random package from a different 
+release will take more effort than just adding and maintaining a version on 
+one perl-base dependency.
+
+Regards,
+Buchan
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