Who maintains RPM? [LWN.net]

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 23, 2006 3:02 UTC (Wed) by skvidal (guest, #3094)
In reply to: Who maintains RPM? by smoogen
Parent article: Who maintains RPM?

the problem with the soft dependencies is that we've got no defined semantic for handling them automatically. Additionally, we have no policy to keep someone from doing:

Enhances: glibc

and having their package pulled in EVERY time.

This, among other reasons, is why we wanted to stage in things like Suggests/Enhances - the soft deps.

We wanted to be able to know when those things would go in. And since they would have fairly far-reaching impact gracefully add them - probably as a major point release or at the very least not a minor.minor release.

I think it would be radical and exciting if rpm had:
1. a roadmap
2. a development cycle based on time or at least based on feature
3. some concept that some features break things or cause other havoc so they need to cycle them through in something other than point release.

-sv

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Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 23, 2006 11:44 UTC (Wed) by n3npq (guest, #40075) [Link] (1 responses)

Not true.

The mechanism for soft dependencies in rpm sets a RPMSENSE_MISSINGOK bit which has
pre-defined semantics that the dependency is provided to depsolvers who are free
to do whatever they wish with the dependency including ignoring the dependency
entirely as rpmlib does.

So ignore
Enhances: glibc
in yum if you wish.

Or even better, fix the package that contains a bogus dependency.

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Sep 4, 2006 4:40 UTC (Mon) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

> Or even better, fix the package that contains a bogus dependency.

That's a lot easier done in Debian, where the project controls all 17,000 packages, then in Fedora, where unofficial repositories contain a large fraction of the packages in common use.