[Rpm-metadata] Debian metadata (was Re: format misc)

[Jeff Licquia]

On Wed, 2003-10-08 at 16:39, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> Jeff Licquia wrote:
> >Oops.  Sorry for bringing up an old boat-anchor.
> 
> NP, we all have our crosses to bear. I hear Suggests: has hysterical 
> legacy too ;-)

Recommends and Suggests have been interesting, both from technical and
political points of view.  But they're still considered proper Debian
practice, unlike (it seems) PreReq.

> >Debian needs Pre-Depends because dpkg batches unpack and configure
> >stages of package installs; Pre-Depends forces dpkg to batch a package
> >and its dependency in separate batches, so the dependency is fully
> >installed before the other package install starts.
> 
> I might be able suggest alternative means in dpkg to handle this 
> situation if you wish.

You've pricked my professional curiosity; how?

Although it is off-topic; maybe personal mail?  Unless everyone else is
really hankering for a technical discussion of dpkg. :-)

> If I'm vendor neutral, I note that SuSE still uses rpm-3.0.6, and there 
> might (I can't
> figger any need and  I don't know of any current depsolvers based on 
> rpm-3.0.6. Well there's
> apt-rpm, but I believe the rpm-3.0.x support is almost, but not quite, 
> history) be
> reasons to expose PreReq:. If you absolutely must, then other tokens 
> could be added to
> the Flags element to expose the PreReq: bit. If you go this pathway, 
> there are other
> context bits that probably need expose too. Please coordinate the 
> changes with me,
> as I have to figger what I can commit rpm to support, and what is gonna 
> need rework
> before being generally useful and maintainable.

My attitude here is to be as little of a pain as possible, since we
Debian folk are kind of horning in.  This is the *rpm* metadata list,
after all.  But I think it's obvious that there are benefits if the
rpm-metadata format is flexible enough to handle deb as well.

So I'm not opposed to whatever proposal seems the best from the RPM
side, as long as we Debian folk have some way of divining the things we
need.  I was just wondering if RPM had something like Pre-Depends so we
could avoid Balkanizing the namespace.