[Yum] yum chooses 'older' provides

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 06:30:33PM -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> 
> it's a 'feature' of a sort.
> 
> when dealing with equally as good different-named provides of a
> dependency yum does:
> 
> 1. closest arch to the arch of the system
> 2. shortest name of the package
> 
> it's #2 where libnet10 is being grabbed.

Is it really a feature, or a bug not important enough to care about?
In my opinion, in case there are only versioned virtual provides, the
higher should be chosen. And when there are also unversionned virtual
provides and 2 or more versioned provides, the packages providing the
lowest virtual provides should not be choosen.

More generally, does yum ignores the version of versioned virtual 
provides? In that case there are certainly other similar issues, with
Conflict, Obsolete(?) or even versioned Requires? But maybe this is 
because this opens too much issues, because it interacts with Requires, 
Conflicts and Obsoletes?

> change the dep so libnet-devel is pulled in specifically.

Indeed users should do yum install libnet-devel since there is only
a static lib, but it still would make sense to have yum install libnet
does the right thing. And I guess there are cases with different packages
implementing a versioned capability where this should be really interesting
(for example, at some points we discussed having a versionned 
motif/motif-devel virtual provides for openmotif and lesstif. It is not 
done, but would make sense).

--
Pat