rpm 4.12 and weak dependencies

[Orion Poplawski]

On 10/08/2014 12:31 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> Greetings. 
> 
> This F21 change: 
> http://fedoraproject.org//wiki/Changes/RPM-4.12
> 
> has brought us 'weak dependencies', namely: 
> 
> Recommends, Suggests, Supplements and Enhances
> 
> Rpm in f21 and rawhide sees these in spec files and builds fine with
> them. createrepo in those branches also exports this into the metadata. 
> 
> yum however doesn't do anything with that information. 
> dnf does (although it's not clear to me what exactly it does do, so
> input from dnf maintainers would be great). 
> 
> There's 4 packages that are already using these weak deps, but our
> default package manager (yum) doesn't understand them. People
> installing via yum and installing via dnf will see different behavior. 
> 
> I filed a fesco ticket to ask that we ask maintainers to please not add
> these until we have guidelines and our default package manager supports
> this information:  https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1353
> 
> FESCo asked me to post here and see what folks think.
> 
> Should we just ask folks not to use these for now (honor system). 
> 
> Should we add a check to redhat-rpm-macros to check packages and fail
> the build if they use these tags (for now). 

I don't think we should allow these in Fedora until expectations are agreed
upon and the tooling works.  Whether we enforce it with a check or honor, I
don't have a strong opinion.  I'd like to think an honor system would work.


-- 
Orion Poplawski
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