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

[Dan Fandrich]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 11:37:37PM +0100, nicolas vigier wrote:
> Versionned dependencies are added when they are needed to allow correct
> updates on stable release or upgrades from one release to an other
> (installing all available updates, not only some of them), for example
> to require installing some packages in the same transaction. Or when
> the dependencies can be detected and added automatically. But I don't
> think you should expect to be able to take any package from any release
> and install it on an other release with accurate dependencies.

This is exactly the kind of policy statement I was hoping to find somewhere. 
If this is the consensus, I'm happy to update the wiki with this added
detail.

But when you say "from one release to another", presumably you want to
limit how many releases back you want to bother supporting. There's not
much point in checking for a minimum version that hasn't shipped for 5 years.

>>> Dan