providing what they require

[Ville Skyttä]

On Thursday 23 October 2008, seth vidal wrote:

> Yes - if the pkg provides something it requires then the requires can be
> removed.
>
> A simple addition to the rpmbuild process to remove these items from the
> requires wouldn't hurt.

When I suggested this on rpm-maint a little over a year ago, there were some 
objections because that would render rpm's --filerequire less useful/correct 
than it is today.  Maybe it wasn't implemented because of that or just 
because of lack of manpower at the time.

http://lists.rpm.org/pipermail/rpm-maint/2007-July/001578.html

The objection is valid per se, --filerequire would suffer (but not become 
entirely useless).  I wouldn't personally mind inflicting some inaccuracy 
into it if the gains are large enough.  I got a 7.3% decrease estimate in 
overall number of dependencies in Fedora which should be order-of-magnitude 
correct (see above post for more details).

But if this can't be done in rpm(build), it probably can in createrepo as I 
don't think something like --filerequire is (or even can be) implemented in 
any tools using the metadata.