[Fedora-packaging] Question about how libgcj-devel requires zlib

Bruno Wolff III bruno at wolff.to
Mon Sep 22 19:45:33 UTC 2008


On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 14:29:05 -0400,
  seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 
> Yes - that's a file dep - that's how they work. I'm not a big fan of
> them, either.
> 
> If you'd like to lead a crusade to get rid of them I'll happily follow
> but seeing as I've tried it twice I'm not going to lead another one :)

Right now I am cla only and not in a good position to lead packaging
initiatives. (I want to eventually be a packager, but the code I have a
particular interest in packaging is written in java which I not that
familiar with and needs to have have copyrighted images scrubbed and
will still need to be looked at further because it is based on a boardgame.)

I don't think finding references to files and changing the providing packages
to explicitly provide them would be all that hard. While this would speed
up yum in some cases I am not sure this is really the right approach.
Someone really needs to think about how provides/requires should be used
and how multilib will interact with this. I suspect this wouldn't be a high
priority initiative. The benefits would be faster yum and rpm (since filelist
checks for requirements could be skipped) and perhaps a better way to figure
out which i386 packages should be included in the x86_64 repo.




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