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

Dan Fandrich dan at coneharvesters.com
Wed Dec 14 01:31:27 CET 2011


I raised a bug ticket on drakxtools (#3731) because the RPM in Cauldron
installs without complaints in Mageia 1 but won't work there because
it requires a newer version of perl. The perl dependency in the
RPM is listed as "perl-base" when it should really be something like
"perl-base >= 5.14.2" (Mageia 1 ships with version 5.12.3).  The response
I got was that such an upgrade (from release to Cauldron) wasn't supported
and this bug was likely a wontfix.

I looked for a policy that covers this kind of situation and found nothing
clear.  The closest I found was this:

    Packages should only contain Requires if those are absolutely
    necessary for the program to work correctly...Packages must not
    contain explicit Requires on libraries except when absolutely
    necessary. When explicit library Requires are necessary, there should
    be a spec file comment justifying it...Packagers should revisit an
    explicit dependency as appropriate to avoid it becoming inaccurate
    and superfluous.

What isn't in the policy is what "absolutely necessary" is. It is clearly
"absolutely necessary" from a technical perspective that the newer
drakxtools have the newer perl installed for it to work. But, is it
necessary to list that version dependency in the RPM?  IMHO, it is, given
that the perl version in the currently-shipping Mageia distribution is
too old to support it. That seems to me to be the kind of use case for
which versioned requires were invented.

The other argument would be that you shouldn't put any versioned
requires on packages that are shipping along with the dependent
package. In essence, as long as all the packages in your system come
from the same Mageia release, you'll be fine.  I think this is much too
lax, and won't even really work on Cauldron because there can be so many
possible combinations of package versions. It could also break upgrading a
system in place to a new distro version, as urpmi could choose to upgrade
the dependent package first and leave the newer versioned dependency
until much later, leaving the system in a broken state in the meantime.
It also ignores one of the most powerful features of RPM and can end up
causing "DLL hell".

What makes the most sense to me is to use versioned requires whenever
technically necessary, but put a limit on how old a version can be before
it's dropped.  So, if one package absolutely needs a minimum version of
another, that version should be listed as long as an older version shipped
at some point in the past 3 years or 6 releases (or something along those
lines).  After then, the version can be dropped in the spec file. Checking
for older versions that could be dropped could even be automated.

That, to me, strikes a reasonable balance between maintaining flexibility
in being able to switch between package versions and maintainability of
the spec files and RPMs themselves.

>>> Dan


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