Looking for testers: RPM 4.9 alpha

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sun, 28 Nov 2010, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> 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.

This change can be reconsidered.

>
> 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.

...but this I've no sympathy for. You're relying on a stupid, longstanding 
bug on rpm that makes it accept Requires(randomjunk) in some situations: 
in older versions Requires(pre,junk) and Requires(junk) falls through 
silently in older versions but eg Requires(junk,pre) - and 
Requires(hint,pre) does give an error.

 	- Panu -