Dependency reciprocity : real world problem with httpd and httpd-suexec

Joe Orton jorton at redhat.com
Wed Sep 8 07:59:51 UTC 2004


On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 03:39:47PM +0200, Matthias Saou wrote:
> I've ran into a real problem where package A requires B, and B requires A :
> The current httpd and httpd-suexec packages from FC Development. I've just
> installed FC Test from the latest ISOs, a minimal system, then did "yum
> install httpd" from there. The problem is that during the transaction,
> httpd-suexec (which got pulled in as a dependency) got installed first,
> outputting the message "apache group doesn't exist, using root"... BAD!
> Yes, the suexec binary is now sgid root on that system instead of sgid
> apache.

Ouch :(

> Now... I'm posting here before bugzilla'ing this since I'd like to know
> what the general opinion is regarding packages requiring some of their own
> sub-packages like this. I really think it should be avoided since there are
> some side-effects like this one that can arise. Furthermore, I don't get
> why httpd-suexec nor php-mbstring (as another example) got split off... the
> main purpose I can see for such cases is for the original package to be
> overridden by another one providing the same functionality, like the X Mesa
> libraries.

php-mbstring is not required by php in FC3, it's required in the FC2
update to avoid silently removing functionality during the update or a
later upgrade to FC3.

joe





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