[Fedora-packaging] Question about how libgcj-devel requires zlib

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 10:19:54 +0200,
  Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 09:49 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > 
> > If it wasn't obvious from the list above...
> > a) foo-devel requires bar-devel. Currently bar-devel.i386 is sufficient to 
> > satisfy foo-devel.x86_64 which is obviously not correct.
> bug in rpm's version comparison => Your addition doesn't solve it.

How are you going to automatically tell in which cases you need to match
arch and which ones you don't? It looks like you are going to have to
touch a bunch of requires or provides in any case.

> > So you'd rather change all -devel and build dependencies to 
> > %{_libdir}/libfoo.so file dependencies?
> Correct. I think, all what these rpm meta-tag do is to add pollution to
> the rpmdb, to solve a problem to which file-deps would be an already
> existing "natural solution", because they actually are file deps at
> run-time.

For libraries, shouldn't the dependency just be on the library name and arch,
not the actual filename path? The library file could go into one of several
directories and still be available.

> More pollution to rpmdb, more sources of errors and conflicts.

Don't you consider treating all of the filenames installed by a package
as what amounts to provided capabilities, as pollution?

I would think you wouldn't want packages requiring just any old file out
of a package in order to express a dependency on it.