PackageKit in Fedora 15 (beta)

[James Antill]

On Tue, 2011-04-26 at 15:31 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Daniel Mach wrote:
> >  From my POV, RPM Requires should contain only deps which are *required*
> > for a particular package. Suggests/Recommends is really missing
> 
> AIUI, Suggests/Recommends was almost accepted in rpm.org (BTW, rpm5.org has 
> had it for ages), but the yum developers blocked it. :-/

 You are misinformed.
 As far as I know "we" have never "blocked" any rpm feature.

 A suggests/recommends/etc. patch has been proposed to upstream rpm, but
was rejected.
 After discussion it seemed like it would be better to put that kind of
information in repo metadata, instead of the rpms directly. But it's
never been high enough on anybody's TODO to create a patch for that.

 Either of those approaches would only be a very low level of support
though, you'd then need to alter yum and yumex/etc to get any kind of
use out of it.

 Obviously if all you really care about is "install this for everyone,
but let people remove it again" (which is a lot of the suggests+
usage) ... you should be able to do that by adding things to a comps
group.

> IMHO we really need Suggests/Recommends support!
> 
> > and enforcing these kinds of deps via Requires is evil. What you should do
> > now is to add such packages into a single comps group so they get
> > installed together or create a meta-package that pulls all packages that
> > *should* be installed together.
> 
> The problem with comps is that it only works for new installs, not for 
> upgrades.

 I did a patch at the end of 2010 which changes that, but it's a
significant change. I might propose it again for F16.

 That also doesn't affect the above use case.