[Fedora-packaging] Policy question: how tight should cross-subpackage Requires be?

Hans de Goede j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl
Mon May 5 16:44:37 UTC 2008


Tom Lane wrote:
> Is there, or should there be, any Fedora packaging policy about the
> following question?  (I see nothing in the Guidelines at the moment.)
> 
> Given a single SRPM generating multiple sub-RPMs, some of which depend
> on each other, how hard should the maintainer try to ensure that
> matching versions of the sub-RPMs are installed?  Possible answers
> include:
> 
> 1. Do nothing, rely on automatically generated requires (eg, the major
> version of a shared library's soname).  Maximum flexibility, maximum
> possibility of allowing installations that don't actually work.
> 
> 2. Put in cross-package requires of the form
> 	Requires: %{name}-libs = %{version}
> ie, constrain to "same upstream version"
> 
> 3. Put in cross-package requires of the form
> 	Requires: %{name}-libs = %{version}-%{release}
> ie, constrain to "exact same build"
> 

3. definitely is the way to go, we currently already mandate this for -devel
    subpackages, which we need to generalize I think, we should mandate that:

a. -devel subpackages require the main or a -libs subpackage
b. that any inter srpm deps (including those from -devel on main / -libs)
    should be fully versioned

Regards,

Hans




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