[packman] [opensuse] vlc broken; kdenlive

Cristian Morales Vega reddwarf at opensuse.org
Fri Aug 9 11:13:35 CEST 2013


On 9 August 2013 08:32, Stefan Botter <jsj at jsj.dyndns.org> wrote:
> On Friday, August 09, 2013 12:59:01 AM Felix Miata wrote:
>> On 2013-08-08 23:27 (GMT+0100) Cristian Morales Vega composed:
>> > Felix Miata wrote:
>> >> If vlc-codecs is required for VLC to function, why wasn't it
>> >> installed automatically in conjunction with installing vlc?
>> >
>> > Packman is broken:
>> > http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-04/msg00202.html
>>
>> So I guess one who needs such apps as Packman hosts should be running
>> Mageia or Fedora instead. It's a shame, as all I'm actually looking
>> for is to strip commercials from DVB recording files. :-(
>
> One could of course argue, that not Packman is broken, but zypper (or
> rpm) is.

If really needed I could argue it's Jeff Johnson's or Red Hat's fault.
But I was not trying to assign blame here.
Probably "Packman uses openSUSE-specific soft dependencies at RPM
level but not at repository level" would be closer to the truth. But
not everybody will understand that.

> Packman uses an older version of createrepo (on debian), which does not
> know yet of these "soft-dependencies" or sugestions. Using the older
> version is for a reason, mainly because of use of debian and the fact,
> that the last stable version of createrepo does not have this feature.

True, the latest upstream version still has no support for soft
dependencies. It would not make any sense for upstream createrepo to
add them before upstream RPM adds them. Meaning that the version
doesn't matter.
Packman can keep using the old version that comes with Debian. But it
needs the patches from
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/DISCONTINUED:openSUSE:11.2:Update/createrepo
(at least createrepo-0.4.11-missing-tags.patch). And perhaps a RPM
package with the "weakdeps.diff" patch from the openSUSE package.

> So at least for now there are no suggestions, see PM-4, an it is not
> that "Packman is broken".

There is. The suggestion is to add weakdeps.diff to rpm to fix the
"AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute
'RPMTAG_SUGGESTSNAME'" problem.

> If a new feature is introduced, it should have been tolerant to older
> versions of the repos.

It is expanding the semantics.
* Repos with RPMs without soft dependencies can be created with the
unpatched createrepo
* Repos with RPMs with soft dependencies can be created with the
patched createrepo
* Repos with RPMs without soft dependencies can still be created with
the patched createrepo
* Repos with RPMs with soft dependencies can still be created with the
unpatched createrepo, obviously without the expanded semantics

How much more tolerant can it be?

Should the patch have been pushed upstream when introduced? Sure. But
we all know RPM's history...




More information about the Packman mailing list