Re: suggests/requires in rpm

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On Jan 24, 2005, Jeff Johnson <n3npq nc rr com> wrote:

> Meanwhile, rpm -e becomes possible for end-users, albeit at the
> expense of flip-flop through anaconda.

> That appears to be progress forward.

IMHO what would be make this undoubtedly forward progress would be
some means to adorn the graph arrow with an additional annotation
that would aid the depsolver in figuring out whether to bring in the
additional package, to avoid the very flip-flop that many might regard
as a regression.

The annotation I have in mind would go like `if upgrading from V-R <=
v-r' (where v-r is presumed to be less than the current package V-R),
then bring in the additional dependency.

This addresses the issue of updates/upgrades bringing in new
functionality, but not forcing them onto the user that chose to live
without the new functionality after the upgrade that introduced it.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}