Too many unowned directories

[Florian Festi]

Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 01:43:47PM +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>> On Sat, 31 Jan 2009 11:11:30 +0000, Richard wrote:
>>> Why can't RPM deal with it?
>> Because it doesn't do it yet? ;)
>> Perhaps it's not even easy to implement in RPM's current code base?
> 
> Sure thing.  We should file a bug (feature enhancement really) against
> RPM and then forget about the unowned directories thing until that bug
> has been resolved one way or another.
> 
> I don't know if you agree with me, but I think the _right_ way to
> solve this is once in RPM, not 48235 times over in all the packages in
> Fedora.  Even if the RPM implementation is a bit tricky, it's surely
> easier than pushing this job down to every packager.

As far as I can see right now there is only one thing that RPM could do:
Create a file requires to all directories that the packages places files in 
and is not part of the package itself. From my (RPM) perspective this is a 
good, save and simple to implement solution. But it comes with the price of 
yum requiring (and though downloading) the file list for each and every 
transaction. So you solve one problem by creating a new one. Of course this 
new problem can surly also be solved by:

1. Manually adding directories other packages are supposed to put files in 
as provides (replacing pain by more pain).
2. Selecting the directories and files that createrepo adds to the 
primary.xml in a more intelligent way to reduce the requirement of accessing 
the file list to some rare cross repo cases (Tricky and already refused by 
yum upstream in the past, AFAIK).

Florian


PS: If someone knows better solutions feel free to discuss them here or on 
rpm-maint at lists.rpm.org