dangling symlinks in rpm packages for Fedora-devel

[Ville Skyttä]

On Monday 29 October 2007, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 03:00:29PM +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>
> > Of course, you can try to get away with just "Requires: some-pkg-name",
> > but that is too fragile, especially if you already believe that the
> > linked file might be dropped any time.
>
> It really depends on the situation, but, agreed, having a file
> dependency solves adequately the issue in many cases.

And unless the file dependency happens to be an explicit Provides: in the 
package that contains the target file, doing so also causes yum to download 
filelists.* in many cases which causes more stuff to download for people and 
triggers problem reports every now and then when someone looks into why it's 
happening.

I think having both a package name and a file based dependency could be 
helpful [0] - at least theoretically yum could first resolve all non-file 
dependencies, see if things pulled in by those also satisfy the file based 
ones required in the transaction, and only download filelists as a last 
resort if not.  I don't think it currently does though; at least it didn't 
back when I tried that approach in w3c-markup-validator (it's still in the 
specfile nevertheless).

[0] Yep, the fragility of the package name based dependency would still be 
there, but the additional file based one would reduce the probability of 
silent breakage.