On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, Stefan van der Eijk wrote:
> This is one of the tough ones and I don't know how to solve it... But
> perhaps we could compare the Provides and Requires of the resulting
> package against a known (cooker) package.
The only way to solve it is to use manual BuildRequires where the package
maintaier is actually paying attention. You could try going through all of
rpm --requires for a package but this is actually slower than doing it by
hand.
Also, keep in mind when you are doing the Requires that I think you are
supposed to generalize (normalize) the name, e.g. package libfoo2-devel ->
foo2-devel. This way, older rpms work too. If libfoo2-devel doesn't
provide foo2-devel, then perhaps it should. I have said before that I
hate the Debian naming scheme, for many reasons, but this is one of them.
Also note this:
If I have libfoo1 on my system, and now libfoo2 is needed in say Mandrake
8.1, I no longer need libfoo1. I am wishing for a script that would go
through and remove packages which no longer have dependencies. Something
like urpmi, but backwards. I usee rpme, but this seems to be as useful as
rpm -e or less :)
What I dislike most is that both libfoo1-devel and libfoo2-devel can own a
file called /usr/include/foo.h. When you rpm --verify libfoo1-devel
libfool2-devel, one of these packages will have missing, or checksum
errors on files, particularly those shared by both in /usr/include.
I have always ran the rpmverify script in contribs looking for problems.
Too bad Mandrake doesn't use this, as I think pontentially half of our
problems would be avoided before the release. I am not joking. Almost all
the problems I see day to day with cooker is poorly managed packages. Yes,
this is normal for a system in flux, but can easily be avoided.
As an example, the recent broken kdebase package with most of its files
missing would have been caught immediately. Again, with the current rpm,
packages like libfoo1-devel and libfoo2-devel leave old unused libraries
on the system, and make it impossible for rpmverify scripts to detect
tampering, as checksum errors are going to occur naturally, even if some
hacker has not modified the file.
I could rant about this more, but I was only trying to be helpful to you
as you attempt to work out the Requires issues in Cooker for your script.
Fortunately, you have write access :)
--
Sincerely,
David Walluck
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
