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

[Buchan Milne]

On Wednesday, 14 December 2011 04:04:39 Liam R E Quin wrote:
> 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.

This is unsupported. Maybe you should instead contribute documentation that 
makes this more explicitly obvious, but it is a well-known rule in Mandriva 
and Mageia (and usually applies to other distros as well).

If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be a need for backports ...

> > 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.

Installing packages individually from one release on another release is not 
supported. Either upgrade the entire distro first, or stick to packages from 
the version you are on. However 'upgrade from release to Cauldron', when done 
correctly, should usually work as expected.

> 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 outdated (we all expect, at least).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.

But, in supported use cases, urpmi *does* ensure that all the pieces to keep 
urpmi are upgraded in one transaction.

Supporting the use case of installing any random package from a different 
release will take more effort than just adding and maintaining a version on 
one perl-base dependency.

Regards,
Buchan
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