file dependencies and packages and [blocker] bugs

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 00:07 -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 05:45 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-03-03 at 13:52 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > > Hans de Goede (j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl) said: 
> > > > Basicly: yes
> > > > Because:
> > > > -adding a Requires: /usr/share/fonts/foo/bar.ttf line to my package is trivial
> > > 
> > > ... and causes additional megabytes to be downloaded for every transaction.
> > hyperbole. My view on this: the *.ttf deps un-hid a flaw in current yum
> > transaction handling.
> > 
> 
> 
> Where's this bug in yum transaction handling? There's nothing that
> breaks, there's just downloading of the filelists which can be
> circumvented by not having this file-dep. I'm trying to save everyone
> bandwidth and time. There's no bug in yum that's being hidden by this.
The bug is yum's (more precisely createrepo's) file based filtering
heuristics.

It is trying to reduce bandwidth, by removing required information.

> > > Note that actually addding these files to the repodata *breaks any dependency
> > > solver that tries to use it.
> > I don't see this. If this breaks depsolvers, these depsolvers are
> > broken.
> 
> It doesn't BREAK them it requires that you change them to accommodate
> this change. These depsolvers include: yum, apt, smart and probably
> yast.

I don't now about yast and smart, but (IIRC) apt always reads
"filelists", because "primary" doesn't contain sufficient information to
resolve deps. It's one of the reasons why apt's depsolver often is able
to resolve deps when yum fails.

Ralf