rpm dep ordering, specifically OpenOffice.org

[Caolán McNamara]

On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 00:26 -0600, Jerry Amundson wrote:
> On a whim, I removed openoffice* from my laptop running rawhide.
> I saw two errors regarding unopkg because openoffice-core was removed
> before the two packages whose %postun tried to call unopkg.

> 1. Specifically with OO, does it matter?
Well, it does matter somewhat. If the unopkg stuff is not called, then
the extensions get physically removed, but stay registered and pretend
to exist. Its not a massive problem because if they get installed again,
then they are "force" installed and overwrite the previous ones if they
weren't cleanly de-registered. And it can only happens if you remove
"core" so where they are registered into has already been deleted.
Though it should have been done cleanly in the order indicated by the
postun Requires etc.

> Is there cruft left because some cleanup is not done?

Possibly a now junk-dir of libdir/openoffice.org/extensions

> 2. In general, can anything be done? I thought this was discussed
> recently, but can't recall the outcome.

The packages that use unopkg have explicit 
Requires(pre):    openoffice.org-core
Requires(post):   openoffice.org-core
Requires(preun):  openoffice.org-core
Requires(postun): openoffice.org-core
which is "the right thing" to indicate that they need core to be
installed while being installed and uninstalled. Sadly this seems to
have very little effect in reality. 
See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479257

C.