On Mon, 2021-11-08 at 15:41 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
I'm seeing a number of people confused by this message, usually
followed by
some actual transaction error.
I _think_ this is happening because these packages are in comps but do not
exist in the distro. Is this correct? I tried to search for it, but the
error message is _very_ common in ... well, people who are asking about it
because of what I said. (For example:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/542877/2511)
I found
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1538346 but not much of
a general resolution. It does note that one issue is arch-specific
packages (which maybe just need "arch=..." in comps?).
I think we should:
1. Have a schedule standarded task to remove any packages listed but
non-existent after branch from rawhide. (I assume a Rel-Eng task?)
2. Have DNF make this message less scary. Maybe even move down to a debug
message and not show it by default — I am not seeing a situation where
they're useful to _most_ end-users.
Anything I'm missing?
These tend to pile up in comps, and I think resolving them *correctly*
is not always that easy of a task. It's *easy* to just remove them, but
I don't doing like that. Nothing is in comps for no reason. I think the
correct thing to do is figure out why they were put there, and what
they should sensibly be replaced by, if anything. Often it turns out
something got retired because it got renamed, or there isn't a direct
rename but there's a clear conceptual replacement, or something along
those lines. Doing this is rather harder than just blanket removing
things, though and is likely to be a substantial time commitment.
Back in 2018 I did two sweeps for this:
https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/6928aeb646da1729e46ccecfeaf3d71b3eacef6f...
https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/f17d7ec65ef6d4b7d9a183ed76d79f09577b4147...
and those took me at least a day each, I think. As you can see from the
changes, it's often not as simple as "just delete the line".
I also, at the time, wrote a script to find 'missing' entries like
this:
https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/b7db172dc739f8acd50fc8e2a0129931036f3c22...
it's still there, as check-missing in the comps repo. Ian McInerny has
since tweaked it a bit, including making it capable of automatically
removing the 'missing' entries (though I don't think it's a good idea
to just use that and say the job's done, for the reasons explained
above). He ran it and did a mass removal in the F33 timeframe:
https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/pull-request/506
https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/88c584531bf2fddb96ac2020fca0a74e1da37f1e...
though nobody seems to have tried to identify appropriate replacements
for the removed lines, which is unfortunate. Also I just noticed his
changes seem to get indenting wrong, wherever it changes the
</packagelist> line, it indents it wrongly...
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA
IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha
https://www.happyassassin.net