[Fedora-packaging] Are circular dependencies ok?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Tuesday 21 August 2007, Stepan Kasal wrote:
> Hello,
>   in perl, circular dependencies are heavily used.
[...]
> But this seems to bring problems, see the comments in
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/testing/F7/perl-5.8.8-22.fc7
>
> Is this just a bug in yum, or is there a problem on my side?

I would argue it is a bug in yum indeed - it says "foo is not available" for 
various foos that clearly actually _are_ available.

But IIRC similar cases (monolithic package split to several subpackages) have 
been successfully worked around in the past by adding "Obsoletes: 
$monolithic_package < $first_nonmonolithic_package_evr" to all those new 
subpackages.  Based on the perl package changelog, I suppose for this case it 
could be something like "Obsoletes: perl-devel < 4:5.8.8-20" for subpackages 
that perl-devel used to pull in but no longer does.

Having said that, in case you're planning to push the all-the-way split perl 
package to F-7 as an update: FWIW in my opinion it is a pretty intrusive one 
to be pushed at this point.  I think not even all packages in Rawhide have 
been verified to build and work properly with the split done all the way and 
transition-time dependencies dropped.