[Mageia-dev] Bug 2317.

[David W. Hodgins]

It's very clear from the reply in bug 2720 that some packagers still do not
understand the scope of bug 2317.  Hence I've decided to post my reply
to one comment here.

(In reply to comment #8)

> Well the first step here would be that the packager & the QA team after to
> install package from testing withurpmi --use-media "Core Testing" yourpackage

Ever since bug 2317 was opened, qa have been watching for packages
being installed from the Release repositories.

The problem is, that the only way to recreate this problem is to start
with a Mandriva 2010.2 system, with task-kde4 installed AND the package
called root.

When the op upgraded from Mandriva, the version specific dependencies
of the package called root (or one of it's dependencies) prevented the
Mandriva versions of libiodbc2 from being upgraded.

Now, when an upgrade of task-kde4 is being installed using mgaapplet,
it (or one of it's dependencies) has a version specific requires, or
selects the package because it has a higher release, or version, for
a package that is only in Core Release, so the update fails.

This didn't happen during beta testing, as none of the people doing
the beta testing had the package called root installed from Mandriva.

I may be wrong about which package prevented the dependencies from
being installed, but that doesn't matter.  Some Mandriva package
(not available in Mageia 1) has version specific requires, which
blocked the update during the upgrade to Mageia.

The only possible methods of dealing with this (as I see it) ...
- Alter MegeiaUpdate to do the equivalent of urpmi --auto-select
- link all of the Release packages in the Release repositories
   in corresponding Updates Testing and Updates repositories.
   (Massive synthesis.hdlist.cz files)
- Create installations of Mandriva 2010.2 with all possible combinations
   of packages, and test every update on each installation.
   (Not possible with time/diskspace)
- For each  update, get a list of every dependency, then get a list of
   every package that requires that dependency on Mandriva 2010.2, and
   check each of the .spec files for version dependant requires, and
   link those packages only, to both Updates Testing, and Updates.
   (Very time consuming for QA).

While changing MageiaUpdate to do the equivalent of urpmi --auto-select
will have an impact on speed, it is the only reasonable solution, in
my opinion.

I tried to provide a patch to fix the problem, it failed, as it also
picked up suggestions from non-enabled repositories. While I can usually
figure out what perl code does, I'm not a perl programmer.  We need
someone who knows perl and urpmi, to fix this, and quickly.

Regards, Dave Hodgins