On 10/08/2014 12:31 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
Greetings.
This F21 change: http://fedoraproject.org//wiki/Changes/RPM-4.12
has brought us 'weak dependencies', namely:
Recommends, Suggests, Supplements and Enhances
Rpm in f21 and rawhide sees these in spec files and builds fine with them. createrepo in those branches also exports this into the metadata.
yum however doesn't do anything with that information. dnf does (although it's not clear to me what exactly it does do, so input from dnf maintainers would be great).
There's 4 packages that are already using these weak deps, but our default package manager (yum) doesn't understand them. People installing via yum and installing via dnf will see different behavior.
I filed a fesco ticket to ask that we ask maintainers to please not add these until we have guidelines and our default package manager supports this information: https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1353
FESCo asked me to post here and see what folks think.
Should we just ask folks not to use these for now (honor system).
Should we add a check to redhat-rpm-macros to check packages and fail the build if they use these tags (for now).
I don't think we should allow these in Fedora until expectations are agreed upon and the tooling works. Whether we enforce it with a check or honor, I don't have a strong opinion. I'd like to think an honor system would work.