RPM building section of RHL's developer guide

[M A Young]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Jeff Johnson wrote:

> Yup, --justdb works quite well. The issue is who is willing to maintain,
> not whether rpm supports. Different problems, one process, the other mechanism.

I think we were thinking along different lines. I was thinking of a
process which runs maybe daily on the central rpm repository, generates an
rpmdb-redhat type database, and uses this to report back dependency errors
to the package maintainer, which should be relatively easy to do with the
existing rpm, and probably very little additional programming. It also
means it would be a QA problem setting it up, rather than yours!

To achieve the same thing at build time is more difficult, because anyone
building an rpm would probably need an up to date copy of the master
rpmdb so they know the latest situation on any package they have
dependencies, and there would probably have to be some central checking
anyway, so that you can spot inconsistencies based on simultaneous
updates or if package is withdrawn. Moreover if you require such a check,
there might be problems if someone has to update 2 interdependent packages
at the same time.

Other central checking that would be useful would be whether there are any
dependency difficulties with regard to the last release, eg. are the
package versions strictly increasing, and are all non-superceded packages
deliberate or should they be obsoleted by another package.

	Michael Young