[Rpm-maint] RPM 4.12.0 alpha released

[Mark Hatle]

On 6/27/14, 9:41 AM, Panu Matilainen wrote:

> - Support for weak dependency tags (suggests, recommends etc)

I finally got a chance to look at this, and I'm a bit concerned with what is there.

The 'SUGGESTS' and 'ENHANCES' combo should be using the Requires/Provides with 
the RPMSENSE_MISSINGOK.  This way they are ignored when not available, but 
directly affect the installer ordering during dependency resolution.

I know the complaint in the past is third party tools don't know how to process 
MISSINGOK.  (IMHO that's a bug in the external tools, they should be updated.) 
One alternative could be to use the new weak dependency tags and 'adapt' them to 
the MISSINGOK internally so that the dep solver could continue to work as it 
has.  (It still causes some issues for me with the actual package 
contents/format though.)

Note: rpm 'suggests' had previously been implemented to work the same way that 
'recommends' was implemented in Debian.. so the swap in names may be a bit 
confusing -- but the purpose is that this is something that should be installed 
if available, but not fail.

the other, 'recommends', was something that was added to work like 'suggests' 
from Debian.  It's just suggested to the user, but does affect the install in 
any way.