Status of weak dependencies support in Fedora 21+

[Jan Zelený]

On 8. 11. 2014 at 16:49:18, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Nov 2014 21:54:35 +0400
> 
> Peter Lemenkov <lemenkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello All!
> > RPM shipped with Fedora 21+ has support for weak dependencies. What's
> > the current status of that feature? Is it ok to start using them
> > (building RPM with Recommends/Suggests tags)?
> 
> My understanding:
> 
> rpm - accepts them as valid and lets you build packages with them.
> yum - ignores them completely
> createrepo - adds the info to the metadata
> dnf via hawkey - will only use them to break ties if for example two
> packages are both possible solutions, but one also is suggests or
> whatever.
> 
> > I have a real-world example where I'd like to mark a dependency as
> > Suggests instead of Requires and want to know if dnf is ready to
> > process it?
> 
> not really as far as I know.
> 
> dnf needs to handle these cases, it needs documented, etc.


Dnf should already have full support of this feature, at least that is the 
plan. Some people already tested it and so far it seems it works as expected. 
The semantics is described here:

http://rpm.org/wiki/PackagerDocs/Dependencies

However, as people already pointed out, there are no guidelines how to use 
this feature and we don't have this fully tested (kind of chicken-egg problem, 
we can't fully test it unless it's used in Fedora).

We invite anyone to start using this feature to help us sand off the rough 
edges. Any contribution (documentation, bug reports, patches, ...) will help 
us. We would just like to ask you for patience, as the state is what it is -
before F22, this is more of a tech preview than production ready feature.

Thanks
Jan