Fedora Alternatives (Re: [fab] build service)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Michael Schwendt schrieb:
> 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?

No, I never did analysis so I don't know if it's "99,9%" or "99,8%" (or
even less).

> Explicit Conflicts are the worse opposite of versioned "Requires",

As I wrote earlier: Well, we need some conflicts for good reasons now
and then. But yes, they should often be avoided.

> 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?

Talk to the packaging committee please. That really their business. I'm
all for it.

> [...]

And example for a *afaik* (and Michael, please correct me if I'm wrong)
valid conflicts (it was even discusses on fedora-devel quite some time
ago iirc):
  libhugetlbfs/libhugetlbfs.spec
  Conflicts: kernel < 2.6.16
The package for example works fine in a chroot (vserver anyone?) without
a kernel installed, but on normal machines the installed kernels needs
at least to be 2.6.16. And the conflicts makes sure that the users has
none installed that are older -- that's won't work with a Requires (the
user could still have old kernel around and might accidentally boot into
it).

CU
thl