Heads up! Broken deps in Upgrade from 12 to 13

[Conrad Meyer]

On Saturday 20 February 2010 06:03:28 pm Braden McDaniel wrote:
> I guess I should properly read the headings... I guess I misunderstood
> where this was going from your summary.
> 
> If I understand it correctly, it's telling me that a F12 that hasn't
> been updated will have problems being upgraded to F13.  Certainly that's
> not ideal; but it doesn't strike me as exactly tragic, either.  How
> important is this considered, generally?
> 
> I'm not crystal clear on why this is broken, either.  It may have
> something to do with the fact that the openvrml binary RPM changed to
> being a metapackage; but the implication of Boost is a bit confounding.

The ratio of "badness" to the difficulty of fixing it is fairly high. Fixing 
it is fairly trivial. Leaving it broken breaks upgrades for users who upgrade 
distributions using yum update -- which, though it isn't supported, is 
reasonably common.

The solution varies somewhat depending on how broken it is; I'll try to 
describe all possible problems / solutions. There's going to be a lot of text 
here, but nothing hard to do.

If the F-12 package has a higher Epoch than the F-13 package, this is *very* 
broken, but can be fixed by bumping the F-13 Epoch to at least the F-12 Epoch.

If  the F-12 package has a higher Version than the F-13 package and the same 
Epoch, this is probably broken. If the F-13 Epoch is higher (i.e., you 
reverted the version in F-13), you should probably revert in F-12 as well. If 
you just bumped the version in F-12 and forgot to for F-13, you should bump 
F-13 to the same or higher version as is in F-12.

If the F-12 package has the same-or-lower Epoch and the same version, but a 
higher Release, then a couple things may be wrong:
- You may have incorporated changes into the F-12 package that *should* go to 
F-13 as well, but you forgot; in this case, incorporate them and bump F-13's 
Release to that of F-12 (if using the %{?dist} macro) or higher (if not using 
it).
- You may have incorporated changes into the F-12 package that *should not* go 
to F-13 and then mistakenly bumped the release past that of F-13. In this 
case, just bump the F-13 release up. In the future, when making a change that
only affects a single version of Fedora, append a ".1" to the Release version 
(or if it already has a ".1", bump that). Example: "Release 4%{?dist}" -> 
"Release 4%{?dist}.1".

I think that's everything. Let me know if you have any questions, or if I'm 
wrong ;).

Hope that helps,
-- 
Conrad Meyer <cemeyer at u.washington.edu>