[Rpm-maint] Filtering blues

[Alec Leamas]

I'm somewhat unhappy with current filtering mechanisms, or perhaps just 
not clever enough to use them in the right way.

In  a very normal usecase, I have  a private library from which I want 
to block the Provides: This is simple enough using 
__provides_exclude_from <some library.so>.  Here the story should end, I 
have filtered the Provides: the way I want..

However, the package is now un-installable since the depsolver Requires: 
the symbols I just filtered. This  means that I have to filter the same 
symbols which I blocked using __provides_exclude_from from the Requires. 
But this is not a simple __requires_exclude_from, because  that will 
filter *all* dependencies from my library. So I have to use 
__requires_exclude, and enumerate each and every symbol catched by 
__provides_exclude_from in  a long list.

It definitely doable, but it feels clumsy and error-prone.  I miss an 
elegant way to do this, something like __provides_requires_exclude_from 
<file-match> which filters the symbols in <filematch> in both Requires: 
and Provides, or, perhaps better, a way to refer to the symbols in a 
<file-match> found by  __filter_provides_from so I can use them in 
__requires_exclude.

But it might be that I just don't understand how to use those macros. 
It's not that intuitive, really.

Thoughts?

--alec