[Fedora-packaging] llvm case study: yum's handling of newly-converted noarch subpackages

[Paul Howarth]

On 08/06/10 10:09, Mamoru Tasaka wrote:
> Michel Alexandre Salim wrote, at 06/08/2010 05:12 PM +9:00:
>> An LLVM user reported to me a problem updating LLVM (from the version
>> in F13-updates to the version that is then in Koji), and I suggested
>> that he filed a bug report.
>>
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=600969
>>
>> In the discussion that follows, James Antill diagnosed the problem as
>> due to llvm-doc being changed to be a noarch subpackage, as supported
>> by RPM 4.7 and above, and thus when using yum to update from
>> llvm-2.7-1 (with arched -doc) to 2.7-4 (noarch doc), llvm-2.7-1 causes
>> llvm-2.7-1.i686 to be pulled in to satisfy the dependencies)
>>
>> To reproduce:
>> - on an x86_64 system, yum install llvm-doc
>> - Download llvm{,-doc} from Koji
>> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=176782
>> - Try a yum localupdate or a yum localinstall
>>
>> The suggested fix by James, and by some folks on #fedora-devel, is to
>> make the new -doc Obsoletes: the old doc. This, alas, does not quite
>> work:
>>
>>
>> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=2236690
>>
>> - Download llvm-2.7-5 from the scratch builds above
>> - Retry localupdate / localinstall
>>
>> the -doc update is considered but then dropped.
>>
>> Any idea how to fix this? We should probably add a section to the
>> packaging guidelines, on how to migrate to noarch subpackages without
>> breaking upgrade paths.
>>
>> Thanks,
>
> Looks like that just yum must hanble {i686,x86_64,etc}<->  noarch
> transition correctly (i.e. I will vote that this is a bug in yum).
> My recognition is that rpm -Uvh handles this correctly.

I thought this was fixed over a year ago.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=502401

If it's broken now, I'd think it was a regression.

Paul.