Distributions going smart & bugfixes?

[Axel Thimm]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 01:15:11PM -0800, Michael Jennings wrote:
> On Friday, 09 January 2009, at 08:29:26 (+0200),
> > Probably depends on what rpm branch you're talking about - since
> > rpm.org is used in Fedora 10 and the latter is using more and more
> > such dependency loops/conglomerations it would be quite funny if the
> > Fedora rpm developers wouldn't notice killing their coworkers work.
> 
> Well, there is only 1 "Fedora rpm developer," and I'm pretty sure you
> were referring to the "Red Hat rpm.org developers."

I'm not sure what you mean, but aren't these days "Red Hat developers"
automatically "Fedora developers"? Or rephrased: Isn't Fedora rpm
development in rpm.org just going to end up in RHEL6/7 etc? There are
Fedora developers that are not Red Hat (or RHEL) developers, but only
very few Red Hat developers not working on Fedora.

> Regardless of the errors Fedora packagers make, there is really no
> such thing as a dependency loop that is not inflicted by a packager.

Even max-rpm discusses dependecy loops as a valid instrument, although
it recommends against them. And it mentiones the PreReq vs Requires
mechanism that was used to reorder packages within a loop.

Furthermore the packages looping are packaged by the eldest of the Red
Hat folks, so w/o seeking into archives I can just assume that the
loops or conglomerations are known and accepted not to be
errors.

Therefore you can't consider this a repo problem and ask the packager
to "fix" it.

> (Otherwise, bootstrapping would be impossible.)

There are "loops" in packages needed to bootstrap a minimal Fedora >=
10, so there doesn't seem to be an issue with bootstraping otherwise
there wouldn't exist a Fedora 10.

Consider a "loop" of the above kind like packages that are only
accepted in pairs or tripples (or more) to be installed. The
requirement for such loops is that the order they are installed is not
important, e..g the dependencies are runtime, not installtime.

One can start discussing whether this is a good thing or not (up to
now this was only a discussion whether this exists or not), but this
is probably the wrong list to do that, the various rpm lists are
better for that. From smart's perspective it just needs to know that
this scenario exists and that it needs to cope with it (like it
already does with the bugfixes).
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.labix.org/pipermail/smart-labix.org/attachments/20090110/34df2f5f/attachment-0003.pgp>