Dependency loops considered harmful?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 14:10:47 -0500 (CDT), Jon Ciesla wrote:

> > game-0.8  Requires  game-data = 0.8
> > game-data-0.8  Requires  game    (which version? and why?)
> >
> > Case 1)
> > game-data-0.8  Requires  game = 0.8
> > What happens if game-1.0 is released with unchanged game-data?
> > Then you need to update game-data for nothing else than the broken dep.
> 
> I've yet to see this happen.
> 
> > Case 2)
> > game-data-0.8  Requires  game
> > No version. Hence no dep breakage in all cases where you may update game
> > without updating game-data. Instead, a strict dependency is installed
> > in pkg game:  game-%{version}  Requires  game-data = %{SOME_version}
> > Here you can control the game-data version within pkg "game".
> 
> But then if I somehow manage to update the game data but not the binary
> rpm, and there's an incompatibility, Bad Things happen to the user.

No, because you still have the strict dependency in pkg "game":

  game  Requires  game-data = %{some_specific_version}

You cannot bump game-data to another major version without breaking
this dep.