From: "Neal Gompa" <ngompa13@gmail.com>
To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel@lists.fedoraproject.org>
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2015 2:48:19 PM
Subject: Re: Can soft dependencies help to get the proper kernel-devel        packages? (Was: Soft- Re: DKMS is not installing the right kernel-devel        package)

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!

Well, they may be allowed but it's not clear yet whether they can be used for any other purpose then for pointing to packages that enables optional features of the package in question.
--
Radek Holý
Associate Software Engineer
Software Management Team
Red Hat Czech