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

Wed Dec 14 11:23:24 CET 2011

On Wed, 14 Dec 2011, Dan Fandrich wrote:
+
+> It's possible to handle that kind of case reliably, but I understand that
+> it would be more work to get the dependencies just right. Many library
+> authors put plenty of effort into maintaining binary compatibility across
+> releases just so this sort of thing is possible. But even if this isn't an
+> officially-supported mode of operation, problems like the one I described
+> above can still result in broken systems if the dependencies aren't
+> correctly described.
+
+It's impossible to describe all dependencies correctly. We don't know
+the minimal versions of most dependencies. That would need to be tested,
+but we cannot test all combinaisons of packages. And even adding all
+those minimal version dependencies would not be enough. If
+drakxtools-backend had a dependency on new perl, then new perl would
+have been installed, and maybe drakxtools-backend would work but all
+other perl tools could be broken. So maximal version is also needed,
+but we cannot guess which version will add incompatibilities in the
+futur. It's already difficult to have correct dependencies within one
+release, but it's impossible to do it for any combinaison of packages
+from different releases.
+
+