Looking for testers: RPM 4.9 alpha

[Panu Matilainen]

It's that time of year again, although there seems to be an off-by-one bug 
in the calendar system causing some inconsistency in the timing wrt last 
year :P
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2009-November/042339.html

Anyway, before going to beta and starting the inevitable Fedora Feature 
process, we'd like some extra preliminary testing to catch out any major 
issues early on.

The alpha isn't supposed to eat your system alive or anything, but proceed 
with appropriate cauting, backing up the rpmdb etc, as usual.

The draft release notes are at http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0
and Fedora compatible SRPM(s) can be found at 
http://laiskiainen.org/rpm/srpms/

In particular, I'm interested in feedback on the new, pluggable and 
enhanced dependency extration system. Documentation is scarce at the 
moment but some background and examples can be found here: 
http://laiskiainen.org/blog/?p=35

Note that the current SRPM is missing gstreamer plugin, cups driver 
and automatic "devel-symlink" dependency generation, on purpose: the 
highly application-domain specific gstreamer + cups bits can now be fully 
moved out of rpm to gstreamer-devel etc, eliminating the need for 
embedding python inside /bin/sh scripts and such to avoid extra 
dependencies. The devel-symlink generation will stay in rpm but will 
probably change somewhat, it can be handled in a more generic fashion now.

Please report any oddities found, preferably to rpm.org Trac
at http://rpm.org/newticket or rpm-maint list (or here for fedora-specific 
discussions/suggestions etc).

P.S. Pjones, before you ask ;) The much wanted ordering-only feature is 
not in the alpha, but is likely to make it into beta. The patch itself is 
fairly trivial and non-intrusive, we're just trying to figure sane spec 
syntax for it (discussion ongoing on rpm-maint)

 	- Panu -