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

Wed Dec 14 10:20:57 CET 2011

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 09:04:39PM -0500, Liam R E Quin wrote:
+> It's really hard to test for dependencies like this, as the person
+> building the package will have working versions of everything.
+
+It would be tricky, but entirely possible to be tested automatically.
+
+> 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 outdated (we all expect, at least).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.
+
+I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about maintaining
+the version numbers in the spec files?  I agree that after a few releases
+it becomes more and more unlikely that a smooth upgrade could happen at
+all, so I would be happy cleaning out the spec files of such versions
+after a time.
+
+> 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.
+> 
+> My Mandriva Cooker system was unbootable for a while recently because
+> upgrading udev didn't pull in other required packages; the desktop
+> wasn't working for similar reasons.  You can say, don't stop
+> mid-upgrade, but a network outage or a power failure can make such
+> things happen.
+
+Exactly. That's just the kind of edge case that shows that this isn't merely
+a problem with unsupported use cases.
+
+>>> Dan
+