To Require yelp or not to require yelp

[Matej Cepl]

On 2007-06-10, 06:51 GMT, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> Hans de Goede wrote:
>> 2 days ago I got 4 bugs requesting me to add Requires: yelp to 
>> packages using it for their help system.
>> 
>> So I issued 3 rawhide updates (one bug was a false positive).
>> 
>> However yesterday I received a comment in all 4 bugs to please not 
>> Require yelp ?????
>
> Here's another way of looking at it: why should 100+ gnome packages 
> require something that should be installed as a base part of GNOME?  If 
> we want to make it a requires, I'd say that gnome-desktop or something 
> ought to require it, not every f-ing package.

Hi, Hans,

let me apologise for this mess -- problem was lack of
communication or miscommunication among the RH people of the
desktop team. With some people I have agreed upon this change,
but Christopher (and other people) missed this discussion (and I
probably haven't shouted loud enough). Yes, I should probably
learn to discuss Fedora matters on #fedora-devel instead of the
internal IRC -- I am sorry.

@Christopher: I have this scenario (taken out of bug
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=242673) --
user removes firefox from his system (for example, because he
wants to install firefox.i386 instead of firefox.x86_64). Yum
dutifuly notes, that depending package yelp will be also removed.
Our user has no clue, what yelp does, name doesn't mena anything
to him, and he things that it is yet another package uselessly
installed by Fedora installer (rightly or wrongly, it is the fame
of Fedora installer), so with a light heart presses yes. Then he
reinstalls firefox-32 and hopes that everything is as it was,
except that his beloved flash player could be installed (yes, I
agree, we should have nspluginwrapper in the Fedora repos; we
don't). And suddenly most Gnome applications don't have help. He
might forgot about removal of yelp, he stil has no clue what it
does, and so he has no clue what happened (and blames firefox in
this case).

IMHO, the problem is that our system doesn't have Debianish
Recommends: and Suggests: soft dependencies. In my ideal world
yum would say not only that package yum will be removed, but also
that functionality of all these packages (list of 96 packages)
will be affected, because yum would know that yelp is recommended
by all those packages.  See
<http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html>
for definitions of these relationships.

And yes I know it is hopeless to suggest any change in rpm, so we
are stuck in this far-from-ideal world.

Any ideas?

Matej