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

[Thierry Vignaud]

On 14 December 2011 10:14, Dan Fandrich <dan at coneharvesters.com> wrote:
> 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.

This is bullshit.
urpmi will upgrade perl itself first (with glibc, rpm & perl-URPM).

> 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.

This is totally unrealistic.
If someone is fool enough to perform a live upgrade on a server
still serving requests, it deserves being shoot. Twice.
One usually pulls a server out of trafic, upgrade it, then put it back
in use. And keeps HA by keeping another old server responding.
That's not a valid use case.

>> 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.
>
> Yes, "usually". Is Mageia the operating system that works reliably 95% of the
> time?

This will break on every distro.

>> But, in supported use cases, urpmi *does* ensure that all the pieces to keep
>> urpmi are upgraded in one transaction.
>
> But only if the dependencies are set correctly. And my original bug report on
> that has just now been closed as WONTFIX.

Once again, your report has nothing to do with urpmi.
Urpmi doesn't depends on quite a lot of packages and
it WILL upgrade them first then restart.