Wow.

[M A Young]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> Alan Evans <ame.fedora <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> It's just that in this case, I didn't expect updating subversion to
>> pull in a new version of openoffice! And sendmail???
>
> If packages A and B both depend on library L and if Rawhide has a newer version
> of L with a different soname major version (the number which indicates which
> versions of a library are binary-compatible with each other), then you cannot
> update package A without updating B, even if A and B are otherwise completely
> unrelated (because updating A drags in L which drags in the updated B because
> the newer L is no longer compatible with the old B - dependencies work both
> ways in this case). If L is a core system library, there can be a lot of
> packages like B.

In this case the dependency is libdb-4.7.so. I have been experimenting 
with getting Fedora 10 beta OpenOffice 3 onto Fedora 9, and found that I 
needed about 30 rawhide packages in addition to the OO3 ones (which would 
have been much more except I pulled in the compat-db to put back 
libdb-4.6.so), but by creating a db47 package to provide libdb-4.7.so to 
Fedora 9 this dropped to 6 or 7 such packages.

 	Michael Young