On 10/24/2009 03:13 AM, Richard Ryniker wrote:
A couple of years ago, I was so frustrated by multiple, failed attempts
to build applications because some<your_name_here>-devel package had not
been installed that I wrote a program to iterate over every installed
package name and report any matching, uninstalled "-devel" package
available in a repository. After I told yum to install all those
...
1. you had serious overkill
2. if you didn't have the 'base' package installed, you still didn't get
the needed -devel package installed to build your app.
RPM is about reproducible package building. To this end, it gives the
opportunity to list both runtime and build time requirements. Usually an
upstream author will (should) mention, in some text note, that to
compile her program, install x,y,z
The .spec formalizes this. It doesn't help when that upstream note
missed things.
The Fedora build systems (via mock) enforce this by preparing a chroot
that contains only the build-requires written into the spec. If the
package fails to build you haven't included all requires yet.
Additionally, if the package builds but didn't have some optional
capabilities, then a build requires might be missing for that optional
feature.
...
One place useful information might be added, without risk of
instability, is in package descriptions. For example, F12 moved GNOME
preferences for windows from the control-center package into a
control-center-extra package. If some pointer had been put into the
description for control-center, users might have an easier time to
learn this - especially if this sort of track were provided often so
one easily learned to look for it. (The F12 Release Notes lists
control-center-extra, but says nothing about why it exists.) If we
The RPM packager can already do this, by adding provides in the package.
When a tool like yum whatprovides /x/y/z or a capability, the package
that provides it is returned. Usually, the new package also provides an
obsoletes (with version), to inform package managers that this new
package takes over some roles of the original package.
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