[Rpm-maint] allow to remove Requires(pre) or not?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Thursday 28 February 2008, Panu Matilainen wrote:

> To be exact: of course the very script of the installed package wont run
> ever again, but in nearly all cases an updated version of the package will
> have the same dependencies on it's pre/post, thus bringing back the
> dependencies you just removed manually.

On enterprise oriented distros that update can easily be many years ahead or 
might never even happen.  And in enterprise oriented setups it's not uncommon 
to have a "if it's not strictly required, it's not installed" policy towards 
packages.

> So in practise, the "feature" is not as useful as it might first seem,

Depends, see eg. above.  Another example where I can think of it being useful 
would be read only setups, especially on space constrained media.

> and 
> treating a couple of scriptlet types differently from everything else is
> just inconsistent and quirky behavior.

At the time I was educating myself about context marked dependencies (almost 
entirely through experimentation) and documented my findings in the max-rpm 
snapshot, I found that rpm wanted scriptlet dependencies kept around *until* 
that particular scriptlet has run (ie. pre/post until package installed, 
preun/postun until package erased or removed during upgrade).  This worked 
consistently for all scriptlets and I didn't find it quirky at all.  Has 
something changed recently in a way that would invalidate these findings?