Can soft dependencies help to get the proper kernel-devel packages? (Was: Soft- Re: DKMS is not installing the right kernel-devel package)

[Radek Holy]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Thorsten Leemhuis" <fedora at leemhuis.info>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Friday, June 12, 2015 2:19:10 PM
> Subject: Can soft dependencies help to get the proper kernel-devel packages?	(Was: Soft- Re: DKMS is not installing
> the right kernel-devel package)
> 
> Josh Boyer wrote on 12.06.2015 13:55:
> > On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 7:24 AM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > [...]
> > As I said, there are no great solutions here.
> 
> A "works most of the time"-solution would be: Install kernel-devel by
> default. But I'm not seriously suggesting that, because I fully agree:
> It's not a great solution.
> 
> Did anyone(¹) look at soft dependencies in rpm? Can they make our
> tools install the kernel-devel packages in the variants that match the
> kernel variants installed? I suspect they are made to solve problems
> like this, but I'm not sure; and I don't know how far soft dependencies
> are supported in out current stack of packaging tools.
> 
> CU
> knurd
> 
> (¹) no, I'm not looking at you Josh

AFAIK, it is discussed these days whether weak dependencies can be used to express package preferences: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/WeakDependencies IIRC, there were some concerns but I don't remember what was the conclusion.
-- 
Radek Holý
Associate Software Engineer
Software Management Team
Red Hat Czech