RPM dependency rationale (and kernel packages)?

[Jeff Johnson]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 08:50:31PM +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 19:58, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> 
> > For (a totally artificial and probably insane) example, let's say a
> > kernel module was built against some kernel on a build machine and
> > needed the symbol (early in System.map was the criteria of choice)
> > 	c0100218 T stack_start
> > A little bit of sed magic might automagically generate a dependency
> > like
> > 	Requires: ksym(stack_start)
> > 
> > Then the magic construct "ksym(...)" could grovel through the System.map
> > (or whatever insmod uses these days) at install time to check to see
> > whether yes, indeed, there was an already installed kernel that might
> > satisy each and every symbol.
> 
> Or could be checked against an (equally automatically generated)
> 
> Provides: ksym(stack_start)
> 
> (which admittedly would cause quite some bloat in /var/lib/rpm).

Depends on your definition of bloat. For a handful of 3rd party packages,
each of which is chasing a moderate number of symbols, the added dependencies
is a small amount of data to be saved. ymmv, but then it's your bloat.

There are -- of course -- smarter things that could be done if, say,
the existence of one symbol implied another, then one of the dependencies
could be dispensed with.

(aside) In fact, removing the automagically generated dependency on
ld-linux.so.2 that is implied by libc.so.6 (at least until LSB gets
its act together) from each and every package has already saved more
space in /var/lib/rpm than would be consumed by my hand-waving proposal.
But that's a different matter ... ;-)

> 
> Though that wouldn't help if the required symbols are scattered over a
> number of kernels (yes, this is an improbable scenario).
> 
> If we had such a scheme, the user should be able to select which
> requirements to show with '--requires' (unless he's a fan of sifting
> through pages of output).
> 

rpm -q --requires pkga pkgb ... | grep some_regex

WORKSFORME

73 de Jeff


-- 
Jeff Johnson	ARS N3NPQ
jbj at redhat.com (jbj at jbj.org)
Chapel Hill, NC