RFC: best way to fix the regular yum dependency problems with add-on packages from 3rd party repositories

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 02.08.2008 15:41, John Ellson wrote:
> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> About one or two times a month a lot of people run into decency 
>> problems like this:
>>> Error: Missing Dependency: kernel-uname-r = 2.6.25.11-97.fc9.i686 is 
>>> needed by
>>> package kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.11-97.fc9.i686-173.14.09-5.lvn9.i686 (livna)
> Every day I run into dependency problems like this, just with Rawhide 
> rpms, not even third part ones:

Well, the two problems you mention are of a different kind.

Reply out of order:

 > Neither of these dependency issues is flagged in: "rawhide report:
 > 20080802 changes"
 >
 > It would really help if yum would automatically skip any rpm that
> conflicted with any *installed* rpm.  Both for Rawhide and third-party rpms.
 >
>     $ yum update phonon*
>     Error: Missing Dependency: phonon = 4.2.0-1.fc10 is needed by 
> package phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.2.0-1.fc10.x86_64 (installed)

Look closer! It says "[...] (installed)" there -- the scripts that 
generates the rawhide report can't know what you have one your harddisk 
and thus it can't detect this broken dep.

It seems phonon-backend-gstreamer is not in rawhide anymore. I would 
assume phonon-backend-gst should obsolete it, but doesn't. That's a bug 
that needs to be reported and fixed, so it's good that yum boils out here.

Further: I'm not familiar with the skip-broken plugin, but this might be 
a case where skipping updates due to broken deps might do the wrong 
thing to do. At least I have a few old packages(¹) on my disk now and 
then and I would not want to skip updates just because those old 8and 
most of the time unneeded) cruft requires things that are not available 
anymore.

(¹) -- packages that were dropped from Fedora or a 3rd party repo; 
packages that have been installed manually. Yes, I clean those up now 
and then ("package-cleanup --orphans"), but there are new ones every few 
months.

>     $ yum update digikam*
>     Transaction Check Error:
>   file /usr/share/icons/oxygen/128x128/apps/digikam.png from install of 
> digikam-0.10.0-0.1.beta2.fc10.x86_64 conflicts with file from package 
> oxygen-icon-theme-4.1.0-1.fc10.noarch

A bug as well. It's good that yum boils out, because then someone will 
actually report it sooner or later; then someone else will fix it sooner 
or later.

Further: Looking for file conflicts in all packages is a very 
time-consuming task -- it takes many hours iirc and thus to long to do 
it for each rawhide push. In the old Fedora Extras days mschwendt iirc 
had a script that did such checks that; he started it now and then 
manually. But this script just like a lot of other (semi-)automatic 
check scripts from Extras afaics one got lost/forgotten during the Core 
and Extras merge. :-((

Cu
knurd