To Require or not to Require?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 05:28:56PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 05:25:17PM +0100, Bryn M. Reeves wrote:
> 
> > Third party code built against -devel and depending only on the SONAME is fine
> > in this situation as it sticks to the published ABI. In-tree code that plays
> > with non-ABI symbols will break and so may need a stricter dep.
> 
> It is in this situation, but there are other situations where depending 
> on the SONAME will cause breakage. If libfoo 1.1 adds a new symbol, 
> anything built against it may fail to run against libfoo 1.0. But how 
> will you know that in advance if all you have in your dependencies is 
> the SONAME?
> 
Yeah, this is what mschwendt was talking about with the potential of yum
install <package> leading to brokenness unless yum update is also performed.

My reply was really to refute Andreas's assertion that a subpackage doesn't
have any further concerns than an external package wrt version dependencies
which is wrong for both code-related reasons like this and for other factors
(like the relicensing example).

This thread has shown that we should probably update the guidelines to not
appear so draconian about explicit library dependencies (and highlight the
ABI/API implications and possibly get changes to rpmbuild), though.  Working
on an FPC ticket now.

Simo or mjg, one of you want to file a bug against rpmbuild since you guys
seem to know how Debian has already implemented this?

-Toshio
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