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

[nicolas vigier]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2011, Dan Fandrich wrote:

> It's possible to handle that kind of case reliably, but I understand that
> it would be more work to get the dependencies just right. Many library
> authors put plenty of effort into maintaining binary compatibility across
> releases just so this sort of thing is possible. But even if this isn't an
> officially-supported mode of operation, problems like the one I described
> above can still result in broken systems if the dependencies aren't
> correctly described.

It's impossible to describe all dependencies correctly. We don't know
the minimal versions of most dependencies. That would need to be tested,
but we cannot test all combinaisons of packages. And even adding all
those minimal version dependencies would not be enough. If
drakxtools-backend had a dependency on new perl, then new perl would
have been installed, and maybe drakxtools-backend would work but all
other perl tools could be broken. So maximal version is also needed,
but we cannot guess which version will add incompatibilities in the
futur. It's already difficult to have correct dependencies within one
release, but it's impossible to do it for any combinaison of packages
from different releases.