[Rpm-maint] [PATCH 5/5] Add a generic plugin for use by simple Collections

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2010, FlorianFesti wrote:

> On 06/21/2010 10:58 PM, Steve Lawrence wrote:
>> The main issue we have with this is that rather than being controlled by
>> RPM, any package can now become a "collection owner" and do whatever it
>> wants when the collection action is triggered. With that we would have
>> to deal with the possibility of multiple collection owners and malicious
>> packages defining their own collection actions and doing bad things. But
>> I guess they could just do their bad things in %post scripts, so maybe
>> that point is moot.

Malicious and simply unintentional mistakes in packaging can do a lot of 
harm anyway, I dont think collections need any special precautions wrt 
that.

>> 
> Several packages being able to subscribe to the same collection makes perfect 
> sense IMHO. Think about different caches that need to be updated - may be for 
> GNOME and KDE and may be some other desktops.
>
> If the collection would be made more Provides like - or if we autogenerate 
> appropriate Provides - this could be handled with the standard rpm 
> mechanisms:
>
> Packages could Require someone handling the collection. Handlers could 
> Conflict with others to make sure they are the only ones.

Yup, several packages in a transaction claiming to own a given collection 
name could be made to conflict automatically I suppose.

Moving the collection ownership to packages opens up quite a can of worms 
though, things like
- what to do with multilib collection owner packages (eg fontconfig)
- correctly dealing with upgrades and obsoletion wrt installed collection
   owners vs collection owners in a transaction
...etc

 	- Panu -