On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 8:40 AM, Radek Holy <rholy@redhat.com> wrote:


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Thorsten Leemhuis" <fedora@leemhuis.info>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel@lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Friday, June 12, 2015 2:19:10 PM
> Subject: Can soft dependencies help to get the proper kernel-devel packages?  (Was: Soft- Re: DKMS is not installing
> the right kernel-devel package)
>
> Josh Boyer wrote on 12.06.2015 13:55:
> > On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 7:24 AM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com> wrote:
> > [...]
> > As I said, there are no great solutions here.
>
> A "works most of the time"-solution would be: Install kernel-devel by
> default. But I'm not seriously suggesting that, because I fully agree:
> It's not a great solution.
>
> Did anyone(¹) look at soft dependencies in rpm? Can they make our
> tools install the kernel-devel packages in the variants that match the
> kernel variants installed? I suspect they are made to solve problems
> like this, but I'm not sure; and I don't know how far soft dependencies
> are supported in out current stack of packaging tools.
>
> CU
> knurd
>
> (¹) no, I'm not looking at you Josh

AFAIK, it is discussed these days whether weak dependencies can be used to express package preferences: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/WeakDependencies IIRC, there were some concerns but I don't remember what was the conclusion.
--
Radek Holý
Associate Software Engineer
Software Management Team
Red Hat Czech

​Soft/weak dependencies are allowed, according to FESCo. The main problem would be how to structure it to trigger appropriately for this case. Is it even possible to generate a soft dependency at install time?​ Otherwise, how do we ensure the "right" one is picked?


--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!