[Fedora-packaging] Policy question: how tight should cross-subpackage Requires be?

[Tom Lane]

"Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> writes:
> On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 00:30 +0100, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
>> Assuming that 3. is indeed the way to go (and that seems right to me),
>> shouldn't rpmbuild actually be fixed to enforce this?

> No, because 3 isn't always true, and rpm has no way of knowing what a
> -libs package means. 

I agree.  This is very probably good as a standard policy
recommendation, but it's a long way from there to a "no exceptions"
policy.

The bottom line as far as I can tell is that enforcing same-release
match for subpackages of an RPM is a good idea when you don't want to
think very hard about the compatibility implications of a mixed-release
situation.  If a package maintainer *is* willing to think hard, we
should allow him to do that.

			regards, tom lane