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

Mon Apr 16 16:00:06 CEST 2012

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 14:45, Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
+> '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 don't think this is possible without patching rpm :(
+The scripts adding dependencies are working on the list of files in the package.
+The dependencies for scriptlets are added by rpm-build itself (and
+only for the interpreter).
+
+> 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.
+
+Well this does not guarantee anything, the packages may become part of
+the priority upgrade (like any depending on perl) and be installed
+before the new rpm-helper
+