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

[Liam R E Quin]

On Tue, 2011-12-13 at 16:31 -0800, Dan Fandrich wrote:
> 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.

It's really hard to test for dependencies like this, as the person
building the package will have working versions of everything.

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outdated (we all expect, at least).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.

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.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/