To Require or not to Require?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:24:30 +0200, AS (Andreas) wrote:

> > The difference is that the subpackages may need the new symbols immediately
> > when installing the packages, whereas future builds of external packages
> > would link with the latest library version that has been released before
> > and is the one available in the build system's buildroot.
> 
> I don't understand.  How is the contents of the buildroot relevant to
> "yum install foo"?

I think you do understand, but probably you just want to reinvent the 
wheel. Let's see:

No external package can build with new features of the new "foo-libs" package
prior to making that package available in the buildroot.

If "foo" is the base package of "foo-libs", and this -libs package has
added symbols needed by programs in package "foo", an older release
of "foo-libs" would not suffice. On the contrary, all programs
linked with an older foo library will continue to work.

For the corner-case that an update of a program in an arbitrary package
strictly needs a specific minimum version of foo-libs, the packager may
add an explicit dependency according to:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Explicit_Requires 

You don't want to enforce explicit dependencies on library pkg NEVR
in _all_ packages that use the library, do you?