[Rpm-maint] Re: [Rpm-devel] RPM Obsoletes unversioned Provides too eagerly

[Fernando Nasser]

Frank Cusack wrote:
>> What do you mean by "get the bits at install time" technique.".
> 
> You wouldn't require that the user pre-install the Sun rpm.  You'd
> either
> 
> - distribute an srpm which the user would build. in %prep you would
>  fetch the sun rpm and in %build you would repackage it and include
>  your bits.
> - distribute an rpm which in the %pre fetches the sun rpm and
>  installs it into the filesystem.  your rpm would %ghost all the
>  sun files.
> 
> If there is an interactive click-through it won't work of course.
> 

Bingo!

It is evil!  :-(


We do have a SRPM that people can go, grab the payload from Sun and them 
build by themselves a set of RPMs running rpmbuild etc.

But go and try convincing your Java application developers to do that? 
They prefer grabbing the RPM from Sun, because it is "ready" and just 
adding the -compat bits we provide.  They don't want to build the RPMs 
themselves.

Anyway, that Obsoletes(noprovides) would do the trick.  It seems easy 
enough to implememnt if all agree that it is a good feature.