rpm AutoRequires/AutoProvides and dsos not in linker path, do we care ?

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Caolán McNamara <caolanm at redhat.com> said:
> The concern is that the autorequires/provides operate in a flat
> namespace and that eventually there'll be some conflation where
> something linking to /usr/lib/foo.so will force sucking in a package
> that provides /usr/lib/package/plugins/foo.so instead

It has happened with perl modules already.  mrtg has a private copy of
the perl SNMP_Session, SNMP_util, and BER modules (all from
SNMP_Session) and auto-provided them.  Since "mrtg" is shorter than
"perl-SNMP_Session", mrtg was chosen to provide those dependencies,
which didn't work.

mrtg is still auto-providing a bunch of internal modules; only the
SNMP_Session modules were filtered out.

That's just one I've personally had to deal with.

In a perfect world, the solution would be something along the lines of:

- generate the auto-provides for system directories separate from
  package-provided directories

- generate the auto-requires

- filter everything auto-provided from package-provided directories out
  of both the provides and requires

I'm sure that would still break something though.  You'd have to have a
way to flag additional directories as "system" for packages that extend
the system directories list (e.g. by dropping something in
/etc/ld.so.conf.d).

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.