[Mageia-dev] RFC: Add versioned require in rpm on rpm-helper

Mon Apr 16 15:23:48 CEST 2012

'Twas brillig, and Thierry Vignaud at 16/04/12 13:04 did gyre and gimble:
+> On 16 April 2012 13:15, Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
+>> <snip>
+>>
+>> So just to make sure I'm following this right:
+>>  1. Versioned require will fix urpmi-based upgrades.
+>>
+>>  2. Installer (fresh-install) will be fine because basesystem-minimal
+>> will pull in rpm which will pull in rpm-helper.  WE can be confident
+>> this will happen early.
+> 
+> No you cannot on upgrade.
+> Package ordering will depends on versioned requires.
+
+I don't understand... This is a fresh install, where did upgrade come
+into it?
+
+Just to clarify, the *fresh install* case is fine, it's the *upgrade*
+case (which I specifically outlined separately below to avoid confusion
+- although that clearly failed) that has the problem. Correct?
+
+>>  3. Installer (upgrade) will still be broken as it does not treat the
+>> rpm package inside the chroot as any kind of priority update that is
+>> installed early in the upgrade process.
+> 
+> installer upgrade will be OK if systemd unit packages require a recent
+> enough rpm-helper
+
+I wasn't really looking for solutions, just trying to understand the
+problem clearly. Proposed solutions often cloud the thinking about the
+problem itself.
+
+
+So putting "Requires(pre): systemd-units" in all packages providing a
+systemd unit seems wrong (it doesn't require systemd-units at all, so
+this is a fake requires).
+
+Putting "Requires(pre): rpm-helper >= $ver" also seems somewhat overkill
+and hard to maintain (e.g. what if some other new thing goes into
+rpm-helper? We have to rebuild all packages that use any of the macros
+inside it to get the appropriate versioned require which seems awkward
+and hard to maintain[1]).
+
+Wouldn't it simply be easier to make the installer aware of priority
+updates? That way we don't need to maintain different or convoluted
+solutions for the same problem.
+
+I suspect problems like this have been present in the past but were less
+noticeable due to the minor differences in rpm-helper package. This time
+round it's obviously quite important!
+
+Col
+
+
+1. By "hard to maintain" I don't really mean in individual specs (it
+should be simple enough to parse out any use of the rpm-helper macros
+from a spec and automatically add a "Requires(post|preun): rpm-helper >=
+$curver" automatically), but rather knowing to rebuild all the packages
+as and when needed. It would be nice to now worry about this as a packager.
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
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+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
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+