yum annoyances

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 02:23:29PM -0500, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> > Also, the obsoletes tags in such a package would need to precise, so they
> > match the version-release of the latest Core/Extras package but not beyond
> > that, so that there wouldn't be a problem with other repos providing the
> > same package.
> I think you missed my point.  Is it appropriate to make functionality
> "disappear" on a client system via update packages that serve no
> purpose other than to obsolete other packages?

I agree with you that this shouldn't happen in updates to released versions
of Fedora.

> Package foo in core provides /usr/bin/foo which can be scripted in
> bash scripts. Core decides to remove package foo in fc5 and it has not
> been added to Extras yet. 

If it's known that package is going to be added to extras at some point
soon, that package probably shouldn't be added to the obsoleted-packages
list.


>                           The foo package from fc4 has no unfullfilled
> deps which prevent it from installing and running on an fc5 system.

I'm more concerned about the ones that do have broken deps, which seems to
be a lot of the time in cases like this.

> Why should an fc4 user who is relying on the functionality provided by
> package foo be forced to remove that package via the payload-less
> obsoletes package? We aren't talking about packages that have changed
> names or sub-packages that have been re-structured. We are talking
> about packages that have no functional replacement yet in the
> available Fedora repos. Why should an update/upgrade force the removal
> of such packages and functionality on client systems?  Isn't this
> situation a case-by-case determination for the local admin?

It still could be; the obsoletes-packages RPM would just be a tool to help
if you decide to go that way.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>