Looking for testers: RPM 4.9 alpha

[Kevin Kofler]

Panu Matilainen wrote:
> The draft release notes are at http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0

1. This change:
| Packages with no files can now omit the %files section and still have
| packages generated.
is going to make it a PITA to conditionalize the building of subpackages, 
and it's going to break several existing KDE specfiles very badly (and with 
no warning!): RPM will silently generate empty subpackages where none is 
wanted.

More precisely, when we wanted to conditionalize or comment out the creation 
of a subpackage (e.g. in kde-l10n for languages which are currently not 
available), what we did so far was to %if out only the %files section for 
the subpackage, not %package or things like %post, and this would reliably 
omit the subpackage. Now we'll have to %if out ALL sections referring to the 
subpackage: %package to prevent the subpackage from being built, and all 
other sections referring to it because they'll error out if the %package is 
not there.

2. I presume this:
| Unknown dependency qualifiers are now always treated as errors and abort
| build
also includes Requires(hint), or is that finally used now? The specfiles 
maintained or comaintained by Rex Dieter (and they're many!) have 
Requires(hint) in many places. If this is really an error now, then that 
change is breaking all of KDE and its dependencies and several other 
packages in Fedora.

        Kevin Kofler