RPM

/usr/lib/rpm/perl.prov is broken by design (true story)

Bug #633739 reported by Jeff Johnson
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
RPM
New
Wishlist
Unassigned
openSUSE
Won't Fix
Medium

Bug Description

Tracker

Revision history for this message
In , Mls (mls) wrote :

Yeah, this is one of the reasons we don't run 'perl.req'. The provides are basically just there so that packages of other distributions that require them can work.

Revision history for this message
In , Opensuse (opensuse) wrote :

(In reply to comment #1)
> Yeah, this is one of the reasons we don't run 'perl.req'. The provides are
> basically just there so that packages of other distributions that require them
> can work.

I hope this is not meant as the solution to this bug report - not using RPM's Requires means to abandon a key feature of RPM or any other packet manager.

Fixing the bug is not impossible, but it would require to rebuild all perl packages, so the best time would be with the next SuSE release 10.3.

BTW: I filed another Report about the same script - which fixes a nasty bug that could and should be fixed immediately:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=255009

Revision history for this message
In , Mls (mls) wrote :

Well, the perl folks themself say that the provides/requires.perl script is the wrong way to go. And I won't do a openSUSE only fix that makes it incompatible to other linux vendors.

Revision history for this message
In , Opensuse (opensuse) wrote :

(In reply to comment #3)
> Well, the perl folks themself say that the provides/requires.perl script is the
> wrong way to go. And I won't do a openSUSE only fix that makes it incompatible
> to other linux vendors.

Who do you mean with "the perl folks"?
Do you have any pointers where to find their statements? I'm interested what they say exactly.

And where is the problem with breaking compatibility if you don't have a work system after all? I mean - what do you expect to break if you don't use requirements anyway?

Does your statement mean to keep the current status forever, which means not to use RPM for Perl modules, because sooner or later it will give a lot of headache?

Revision history for this message
In , Mls (mls) wrote :

I remember a discussion in p5p about automatic dependency extraction, and it was considered a bad thing. The proposed way was to add dependency information to the perl modules.
I'm not saying that I want to keep the current status, my argument was that I don't want something different from fedora/mandriva/debian...

Revision history for this message
In , Opensuse (opensuse) wrote :

(In reply to comment #5)
> I remember a discussion in p5p about automatic dependency extraction, and it
> was considered a bad thing. The proposed way was to add dependency information
> to the perl modules.

Was this about RPM and maybe DEB or more generally?
Because CPAN et.al. do this automatic dependency extraction as well.
Of course there is META.yml for this, but hardly any distribution puts their (complete) provides in it. LBNL META.yml is usually auto-generated by parsing the files of the distribution, which in fact is automatic dependency extraction.

> I'm not saying that I want to keep the current status, my argument was that I
> don't want something different from fedora/mandriva/debian...

OK. So what would be the way to go then?
BTW. I don't think SuSE has to worry about RPM compatibility towards Debian.

Revision history for this message
Jeff Johnson (n3npq) wrote :

Tracker

tags: added: opensuse
Changed in opensuse:
importance: Unknown → Medium
status: Unknown → In Progress
Revision history for this message
In , Jeff Johnson (n3npq) wrote :
tags: added: autodeps perl
Jeff Johnson (n3npq)
Changed in rpm:
importance: Undecided → Low
importance: Low → Wishlist
Revision history for this message
In , Rajko (rajko) wrote :

Any opinion what to do with this bug?

IMO, if this bug is present in supported versions of openSUSE, which is
currently 11.2 and 11.3, then it makes sense to keep it open, otherwise CLOSE with UPSTREAM would be better solution.

Changed in opensuse:
status: In Progress → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
In , Mls (mls) wrote :

For now WONTFIX because changing the way the perl versions are encoded is not worth the hassle.

Changed in opensuse:
status: Incomplete → Won't Fix
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