[Rpm-maint] Should installed obsoletes be seen as conflicts

[Florian Festi]

Peter Bowen wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 12:04 +0200, Florian Festi wrote:
>> While discussing the yum resolver I realized that I was erroneously 
>> believing that rpm would treat installed obsoletes like conflicts.
>>
>> Scenario:
>>
>> foo obsoletes: bar
>> foo is installed
>> rpm -ivh bar.rpm
>>
>> Right now rpm installs bar without any error. According to Panu apt-rpm 
>> issues an error here. Is it possible that rpm did issue an error in some 
>> earlier versions? And what is the right(tm) behavior?
> 
> Nope, this has been like this for ages.  If you want it to conflict, add
> a conflict: bar to foo.  
> 
> Also, it should be noted that you can do:
> 
> foo 2.0 is installed
> rpm -ivh foo-1.0.rpm
> 
> Yes, you have to pass --oldpackage, but it works otherwise.  Maybe
> --oldpackage should be required if you try to install a package that is
> obsoleted?

Of course no one wants to make it impossible to install obsoleted packages.
I agree that this situation is much closer to installing an old package than 
having a conflict (especially since obsoletes match package names only now 
and conflicts match provides). An obsoleted package in fact is an older 
version with an different name. So requiring --oldpackage makes perfect 
sense IMHO.

Florian