[Rpm-maint] [Suse-patch] Revert provides as obsoletes behavior

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 22 May 2007, Florian La Roche wrote:

> On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 12:06:45PM +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>>
>> Personally I never ever liked the obsoletes on provides behavior, but this
>> has been in rpm since 2001 according to hg changelogs... I don't think
>> such a dramatic behavior change is acceptable for a dot-dot-dot-dot
>> maintenance release.
>>
>> I would like this changed in future major version though, as the current
>> behavior makes life miserable in some packaging scenarios.
>
> Hello Panu,
>
> this has now been deployed for a really long time, so I don't think we
> should revert this again.

Flip-flopping is bad, agreed... so if this is to be reverted, such a 
decision is not to be taken lightly. I just personally think the current 
behavior is, well, nasty.

> While I see many packages where the obsoletes
> lines match too many other packages, I am not sure if you have an
> example where this is makes "life real miserable". ??
>
> IMNSHO we should rather keep checking repo dependencies before new
> packages are pushed out than changing the obsoletes behaviour to the
> old minimal behaviour.

The problems tend to revolve around compat packages mostly.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=130352 lists several 
examples of the behavior causing headaches, and I remember seeing heated 
discussion over this "feature" or "bug" (depends on one's POV :) over the 
years on various mailing lists.

 	- Panu -