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

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:57:08 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> On 02.08.2008 16:34, John Ellson wrote:
> > Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> >> On 02.08.2008 15:41, John Ellson wrote:
> >>> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> >>> 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.
> > But (1) the rawhide reports do know what is in the rawhide repository 
> > that might be installed, and which shouldn't conflict if they are.
> 
> I can't follow, sorry. As mentioned already, phonon-backend-gstreamer 
> isn't in rawhide anymore. Yes, it once was, but you can't expect the 
> script to check all "was once in rawhide" packages, as the script then 
> would take ages to complete.

It doesn't take much longer, because for normal pkg updates, it would only
examine the latest pkg release. It should take into account obsolete
binary pkgs from the previous compose, however. Only *that* would help
with detecting incorrect/missing "Obsoletes" tags (which is something my
modified repoclosure handles, because in Extras we've had up to two pkg
releases in the repo). On the contrary, the Rawhide report is like a fresh
install of only the latest pkg releases, and one can only hope that there
are enough testers who find and report the additional update/upgrade
problems.