Fedora Alternatives (Re: [fab] build service)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 12 Nov 2006 17:52:57 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

[Conflicts]

> > Is anyone looking into correcting those?
> 
> I don't think so. The questions also is: Do they need to be fixed? Some
> of of those 46 look valid on a first sight.

Did you know that in 99.9% of the cases it would be possible to replace
them with proper "Requires" or an additional "Obsoletes" in a different
package?

Explicit Conflicts are the worse opposite of versioned "Requires", because
they tell the package resolver what is forbidden, but don't tell it how to
fix it without applying lots of guessing. And if there is no way out, uhm,
that's unclean packaging and not suitable for an add-ons repository.

[...]

Example:

  devel/hunky-fonts/hunky-fonts.spec

  Conflicts:      fontconfig < 2.3.93

There's no comment that explains this. Can we please require packagers
to explain such unusual things in the spec file?

Either it's superfluous Conflicts information (overuse of an RPM feature)
or at some point in time the package really conflicted with Core's
fontconfig. In that case, ouch.