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

Mon Apr 16 15:45:43 CEST 2012

'Twas brillig, and Pascal Terjan at 16/04/12 14:35 did gyre and gimble:
+> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 14:23, Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
+>> '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]).
+> 
+> If a package requires a new script, it means there is a call to this
+> script, so I would expect that it was built after this new script was
+> added.
+
+OK, but at present most of the packages that make use of %_post_service
+and friends do not actually require rpm-helper at all. They simply rely
+on it being there from basesystem-minimal.
+
+So I guess doing autorequires would work in most cases - this case i
+somewhat special as we're retro fitting the requirement, and thus need a
+mass-rebuild.
+
+I guess I can live with this if someone can do the necessary foo to add
+the appropriate requires automatically.
+
+I can't help but feel this would still be more appropriately dealt with
+in the installer by making it honour priority updates, even on a
+not-currently-running machine.
+
+Col
+
+
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
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