Fwd: [Rpm-maint] Heads up: Weak and rich dependencies in RPM

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 14:44 +0000, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 7:27 AM, Florian Festi <ffesti at redhat.com> 
> wrote:
> > 
> > We are currently working on adding weak and rich dependencies to
> > upstream RPM. There are basically two parts:
> > 
> Is someone signed up to do the necessary frontend work for this on the 
> dnf/yum side?  If we're allowing choice of "A | B" like this, there 
> needs to be a frontend that actually allows choosing, like aptitude.

Fedora isn't signed up to *use* it yet. We can still make the choice
whether we want to or not, I believe.

> I guess one could go with the "shortest package name wins" approach or 
> whatever the current heuristic is for now...
> 
> This is also relevant with things like kickstart files, where there is 
> no interactivity allowed.

Typical approach there is simply to come up with a 'default' approach,
and that's what kickstarts use. If we use 'rich' dependencies, the
questions would be to set policies for the use of each type of
dependency in Fedora, and decide what level of 'weak' dependency to
install by default. kickstart installs and live image creation would
then, one expects, use that same level.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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