I'm seeing a number of people confused by this message, usually followed by some actual transaction error.
I _think_ this is happening because these packages are in comps but do not exist in the distro. Is this correct? I tried to search for it, but the error message is _very_ common in ... well, people who are asking about it because of what I said. (For example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/542877/2511)
I found https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1538346 but not much of a general resolution. It does note that one issue is arch-specific packages (which maybe just need "arch=..." in comps?).
I think we should:
1. Have a schedule standarded task to remove any packages listed but non-existent after branch from rawhide. (I assume a Rel-Eng task?)
2. Have DNF make this message less scary. Maybe even move down to a debug message and not show it by default — I am not seeing a situation where they're useful to _most_ end-users.
Anything I'm missing?
On Monday, 08 November 2021 at 21:41, Matthew Miller wrote: [...]
I think we should:
Have a scheduled standard task to remove any packages listed but non-existent after branch from rawhide. (I assume a Rel-Eng task?)
Have DNF make this message less scary. Maybe even move down to a debug message and not show it by default — I am not seeing a situation where they're useful to _most_ end-users.
+1 to both.
Anything I'm missing?
Not that I can think of.
Regards, Dominik
On Mon, Nov 08, 2021 at 09:55:42PM +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
+1 to both.
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf/pull/1795
https://pagure.io/releng/issue/10376
On Mon, Nov 08, 2021 at 05:01:47PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Mon, Nov 08, 2021 at 09:55:42PM +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
+1 to both.
I'll add here that even though there's a number of PR's open against fedora-comps, it's pretty reasonably maintained I think. Uncontroversial changes are merged pretty quickly... it's just the messy ones where some group can't come to consensus where they sit around for a long time.
I guess I can just look at closing those and tell people to re-file when they have made some decision.
kevin
On Mon, 2021-11-08 at 15:41 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
I'm seeing a number of people confused by this message, usually followed by some actual transaction error.
I _think_ this is happening because these packages are in comps but do not exist in the distro. Is this correct? I tried to search for it, but the error message is _very_ common in ... well, people who are asking about it because of what I said. (For example: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/542877/2511)
I found https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1538346 but not much of a general resolution. It does note that one issue is arch-specific packages (which maybe just need "arch=..." in comps?).
I think we should:
Have a schedule standarded task to remove any packages listed but non-existent after branch from rawhide. (I assume a Rel-Eng task?)
Have DNF make this message less scary. Maybe even move down to a debug message and not show it by default — I am not seeing a situation where they're useful to _most_ end-users.
Anything I'm missing?
These tend to pile up in comps, and I think resolving them *correctly* is not always that easy of a task. It's *easy* to just remove them, but I don't doing like that. Nothing is in comps for no reason. I think the correct thing to do is figure out why they were put there, and what they should sensibly be replaced by, if anything. Often it turns out something got retired because it got renamed, or there isn't a direct rename but there's a clear conceptual replacement, or something along those lines. Doing this is rather harder than just blanket removing things, though and is likely to be a substantial time commitment.
Back in 2018 I did two sweeps for this:
https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/6928aeb646da1729e46ccecfeaf3d71b3eacef6f?br... https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/f17d7ec65ef6d4b7d9a183ed76d79f09577b4147?br...
and those took me at least a day each, I think. As you can see from the changes, it's often not as simple as "just delete the line".
I also, at the time, wrote a script to find 'missing' entries like this:
https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/b7db172dc739f8acd50fc8e2a0129931036f3c22?br...
it's still there, as check-missing in the comps repo. Ian McInerny has since tweaked it a bit, including making it capable of automatically removing the 'missing' entries (though I don't think it's a good idea to just use that and say the job's done, for the reasons explained above). He ran it and did a mass removal in the F33 timeframe:
https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/pull-request/506 https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/88c584531bf2fddb96ac2020fca0a74e1da37f1e?br...
though nobody seems to have tried to identify appropriate replacements for the removed lines, which is unfortunate. Also I just noticed his changes seem to get indenting wrong, wherever it changes the </packagelist> line, it indents it wrongly...