It's quite common that a package provides and requires the same thing.
IMVHO the "requires" side is useless, and only clutters the dependency database.
Wouldn't it be better if rpmbuild removed them?
(It does not seem practical to solve this in the dependency generating scripts, as the algorithms for collecting provides and requires are usually independent.)
It has been pointed out that this would break --filerequires and --fileprovides, and would cause (more or less theoretical) problems with choosing between Providers of something in certain scenarios (see first message of the rpm-maint thread).
There's no unambiguous way of determining that dependencies are local to a single package.
Provides: cannot be eliminated without a guarantee that no other package anywhere has a Requires:.
And both Provides: and Requires: are attached to files, not packages. Consider
what happens when a file with a Provides: is not installed, where even the guarantee
of "locally satisifed" is insufficient to determine whether a Requires: might be unnecessary.
But have fun! You might even save 3-4Kb by attempting to filter out the "bloat"!
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The deeper issue is tying operations like --exclude to
filtering out dependencies of excluded files. At per-file
granularity, the issue mentioned
Provides matching Requires in same package
is _NOT_ redundant or unnecessary because -- in fact --
the Provides: and the Requires: are supplied by different
files in the same package, and excluding a file should
filter out _ONLY_ those dependencies that are attached to
the specific file.
Okay time to close this - not going to happen in rpm. Like already noted here:
1) This would "break" --filerequire which is useful, if not exactly vital information.
2) Even self-requires are subject to what files are actually installed. Rpm in F >= 15 actually takes this into account (to some extent): when secondary arch binaries are "shadowed" by primary arch binaries, the secondary arch package does not actually provide the binary, so the apparent self-require becomes a dependency on another package. Ditto for replaced files.
3) Even ignoring 1) and 2), the space+bandwith+processing saving from this in rpm headers is neglible, its the re-re-re-repeatedly downladed repodata where such things become more expensive. Createrepo already filters them out (for better or worse)
It's quite common that a package provides and requires the same thing.
IMVHO the "requires" side is useless, and only clutters the dependency database.
Wouldn't it be better if rpmbuild removed them?
(It does not seem practical to solve this in the dependency generating scripts, as the algorithms for collecting provides and requires are usually independent.)