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

[Dan Fandrich]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 09:04:39PM -0500, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> It's really hard to test for dependencies like this, as the person
> building the package will have working versions of everything.

It would be tricky, but entirely possible to be tested automatically.

> Worse, in two years' time, perl-base of 5.14.3 will be hopelessly
> outdated (we all expect, at least). So it becomes one more thing to
> maintain.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about maintaining
the version numbers in the spec files?  I agree that after a few releases
it becomes more and more unlikely that a smooth upgrade could happen at
all, so I would be happy cleaning out the spec files of such versions
after a time.

> But it's also a problem worth solving for some of the system-critical
> components such as perl, urpmi and drak*. I don't think "wontfix" is a
> good answer here.
> 
> My Mandriva Cooker system was unbootable for a while recently because
> upgrading udev didn't pull in other required packages; the desktop
> wasn't working for similar reasons.  You can say, don't stop
> mid-upgrade, but a network outage or a power failure can make such
> things happen.

Exactly. That's just the kind of edge case that shows that this isn't merely
a problem with unsupported use cases.

>>> Dan