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

Wed Dec 14 12:31:36 CET 2011

On 14 December 2011 10:14, Dan Fandrich <dan at coneharvesters.com> wrote:
+> I can understand that my particular case is unsupported, but I described
+> a different, supported, scenario that would also fail due to this problem.
+> To reiterate, a distribution upgrade from 1 to 2 (once it's finalized)
+> could involve urpmi first upgrading the perl-dependent package but avoid
+> installing the new perl itself until the end of the upgrade, which could be
+> hours or (if interrupted) days later.
+
+This is bullshit.
+urpmi will upgrade perl itself first (with glibc, rpm & perl-URPM).
+
+> During the entirety of that time,
+> that package would be unusable. If that package happened to be a key CGI
+> script for a web site, the entire site would be down for that entire time.
+
+This is totally unrealistic.
+If someone is fool enough to perform a live upgrade on a server
+still serving requests, it deserves being shoot. Twice.
+One usually pulls a server out of trafic, upgrade it, then put it back
+in use. And keeps HA by keeping another old server responding.
+That's not a valid use case.
+
+>> 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.
+>
+> Yes, "usually". Is Mageia the operating system that works reliably 95% of the
+> time?
+
+This will break on every distro.
+
+>> But, in supported use cases, urpmi *does* ensure that all the pieces to keep
+>> urpmi are upgraded in one transaction.
+>
+> But only if the dependencies are set correctly. And my original bug report on
+> that has just now been closed as WONTFIX.
+
+Once again, your report has nothing to do with urpmi.
+Urpmi doesn't depends on quite a lot of packages and
+it WILL upgrade them first then restart.
+