[Rpm-maint] splitting packages

[Thierry Vignaud]

On 30 June 2014 15:52, Ales Kozumplik <akozumpl at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hello people,
>
> this is about [1], i.e. the fact that DNF currently doesn't support an
> upgrade path where a package is split into several new packages. It would be
> better suited for yum-devel but I'm posting it here since Michael doesn't
> read yum-devel.
>
> There are two approaches to this out there that I know of: the Fedora way
> where N new packages obsolete the old package [2] [3]. When Yum sees this
> during 'yum upgrade' it installs all the N new pacakges and removes the old
> one. Note that the Fedora guidelines and even the Yum manual page are quite
> vague on the exact semantics of how splitting and renaming works. I'd be
> interested to find a better description somewhere.
>
> There is a different convention used in SUSE [4] that employs a special
> 'split-alias' provide. Michael said in the bugzilla this is not a desirable
> approach.
>
> Before I try to come up with a proposal on fixing this, does somebody have a
> proposal at hand? Could supplements: or similar help? Are there reasons to
> move away from what Yum does (besides that using 'obsoletes:' is a bit
> random thing for it, i.e. I imagine it was more picked because it didn't
> break anything else in the RPM world than picked as a design decision)?

I think the appropriate ml would be DNF one, not this one...