Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 111092
Dependency failure when provider has epoch and requirer has not
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:34 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031003 Description of problem: When a package provides an explicit epoch, and another package requires the provider's package version with epoch unspecified, the dependency check fails. According to /usr/share/doc/rpm-4.2.1/dependencies, an unspecified epoch in a Requires line should match any provided epoch. I will submit spec files for three test packages which demonstrate the dependency treatment of a package which provides an epoch: provides-epoch-1.4.1-17.i386.rpm which provides provides-epoch-37:1.4.1-17 where 37 is the epoch requires-epoch-1.4.2_01-2.cern.i386.rpm which requires provides-epoch = 37:1.4.1 requires-noepoch-1.4.2_01-2.cern.i386.rpm which requires provides-epoch = 1.4.1 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.2.1-0.30 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Copy provides-epoch.spec, requires-epoch.spec and requires-noepoch.spec into .../rpm/SPECS/. 2. Create packages: cd .../rpm/SPECS rpmbuild -ba provides-epoch.spec rpmbuild -ba requires-epoch.spec rpmbuild -ba requires-noepoch.spec 3. Install packages (as root): cd .../rpm/RPMS/i386 rpm -iv provides-epoch-*.i386.rpm rpm -iv requires-epoch-*.i386.rpm rpm -iv requires-noepoch-*.i386.rpm Actual Results: The first and second packages are installed. Installation of the third package fails with: error: Failed dependencies: provides-epoch = 1.4.1 is needed by requires-noepoch-1.4.2_01-2.cern Expected Results: All three packages should have been installed. Additional info: None.
Created attachment 96223 [details] provides-epoch.spec
Created attachment 96224 [details] requires-epoch.spec
Created attachment 96225 [details] requires-noepoch.spec
Not specifying an epoch is broken behaviour. RHL 9 complained about it, and I believe Fedora treats no epoch as epoch=0, so I believe this is not a bug.
Here is the relevant paragraph in the RPM documentation file /usr/share/doc/rpm-4.2.1/dependencies: "The epoch (if present) is a monotonically inceasing integer, neither the version or the release can contain the '-' hyphen character, and the dependency parser does not permit white space within a definition. Unspecified epoch and releases are assumed to be zero, and are interpreted as "providing all" or "requiring any" value." It is the second sentence that makes me believe than an unspecified epoch in a Requires line should match any provided epoch. I feel that the behaviour described in this sentence is logical. Do you want to change the Requires line in every dependent package, at the moment when you are forced to introduce, or to change, an epoch in a providing package?