pidgin obsoleting itself

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:10:10 -0400, James wrote:

> > On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 15:38:48 +0100, Stu wrote:
> > 
> > > I implemented it based on recommendations on the yum wiki that I saw
> > > someone else referred to in #fedora-devel :
> > > http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumPackageUpdates#Packagesplit
> > 
> > Well, that's exactly an example where the two Obsoletes compete with
> > eachother. It works only partially. For an ordinary Yum update.
> > It fails for a Yum install.
> 
>  I'm not sure what you mean by "fail" here.

"fail" as in "it doesn't split an installed package into two, but it replaces
an installed package with another one".

> The above is the only way to
> do a "package split" ... 

No. More correct is the Fedora Packaging Guidelines version, which adds
a Requires on the base package to the new [sub-]package. But see below.

> which is to say you have:
> 
> 1. pkgA-1 contains two files: /usr/bin/A and /usr/bin/A-blah
> 
> 2. You now want to have pkgA-2 and pkgA-blah-2, which each contain a
> single file.
> 
> 3. You want anyone who had pkgA-1 to have both pkgA-2 and pkgA-blah-2
> (because that's what they had before).
> 
> ...if at the end of the "split" you want "yum install pkgA" to install
> pkgA-blah (or vice versa), then it's not _just_ a split and you probably
> want to use a Requires (as you would if pkgA-2/pkgA-blah-2 were the
> first versions). You can do this instead of the obsoletes, but I don't
> see the point.

If at the end of the split user does "yum install pkgA-blah-2", this
erases pkgA-1 ... unless pkgA-blah-2 strictly requires pkgA-2, which
is not always desired.