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

Guillaume Rousse guillomovitch at gmail.com
Wed Dec 14 11:17:54 CET 2011


Le 14/12/2011 10:14, Dan Fandrich a écrit :
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 09:49:15AM +0200, Buchan Milne wrote:
>> 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).
>
> I can understand that my particular case is unsupported, but I described
> a different, supported, scenario that would also fail due to this problem.
> To reiterate, a distribution upgrade from 1 to 2 (once it's finalized)
> could involve urpmi first upgrading the perl-dependent package but avoid
> installing the new perl itself until the end of the upgrade, which could be
> hours or (if interrupted) days later. During the entirety of that time,
> that package would be unusable. If that package happened to be a key CGI
> script for a web site, the entire site would be down for that entire time.
Heaven, a critical component not available during an upgrade :)

OK, let's supose all dependencies have been correctly versioned. Would 
it be sufficient to offer any garanty of correct working order ? I don't 
think so, you'd just have gained a bit more safety during the 
transition. But given we can't already ensure correct working order 
during nominal sitution, I don't think that's really a priority to 
invest efforts toward transitional situations.

Of course, this doesn't prevent you from targeting those issues, if you 
feel concerned. But you'd better ask for a contributer account to do the 
final piece of work (fixing the packages) directly, if your only 
argument to convince packagers is edge case as 'working order during 
upgrade'.

-- 
BOFH excuse #95:

Pentium FDIV bug


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