Some ideas/questions about yum

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 14:57:44 +0430,
  Hedayat Vatnakhah <hedayat at grad.com> wrote:
>
> Now, some ideas:
> 3. AFAIK, currently yum's primary database file contains information  
> about packages, and all of the files in directories such as /usr/bin and  
> /usr/lib, so that it can resolve package and file level dependencies.  
> Isn't it possible to move file level information outside primary db  
> (e.g. to primary_file_deps.db) and translate internal dependencies from  
> file level dependencies to package level dependencies when creating  
> repositories? (So that provides and requires tables in primary db only  
> contain package references rather than file references?). It might be  
> even possible to do it for dependencies outside repository; for example  
> when creating updates repository, you can introduce fedora repository to  
> createrepo, so it can translate all of the file level dependencies of  
> updates packages also.

Personally, I think dependencies of file names is a bad idea. I think they
are getting used as a standin for interface names. I think we would be better
off replacing the current set of file name requires with new provides and
dump file name dependencies. However, the last time I brought this up, other
people disagreed, so it's not something that's likely to change in the near
future.