Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 118423
Package dependancies in the distribution, holding up inclusion of xorg-x11
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:38 EST
xorg-x11 will be replacing XFree86 in the distribution very soon, and as such all packages which have hard coded dependancies on any of the XFree86 package names or versions of them, will have dependancy issues. Some of these issues will require temporary compatibility hacks in the xorg-x11 packaging, while some may require longer term compatibility hacks in xorg-x11 packaging. Other issues will require new virtual Provides lines to be added to both xorg-x11 packaging and also future XFree86 packaging updates, to help minimize problems both with packages in the distribution and also 3rd party rpms. Some of the biggest problems currently are: - Packages that have hard coded Requires/BuildRequires/Prereq on the main "XFree86" package. Many of these may have been around for a long time now, and nobody remembers why they were put there. It is possible that these can all just simply be removed from the various packages and things will just work(TM). If a given package has such a dep listed and it is needed, then the real need needs to be determined so we can figure out wether I need another virtual provides to add or not. - Packages that have BuildRequires: XFree86-devel This one is a bit tougher to solve, and so for the short term, I am adding Provides: XFree86-devel = 4.4.0 to the xorg-x11-devel subpackage, which will make things work for now. Once we split out any particular libraries or even all libraries into their own individual rpms however, there is no easy way to provide an XFree86-devel package or virtual package compatibility, and so packages will really need to update to using virtual provides. - Packages really shouldn't depend on any of the XFree86 fonts packages. If a package does so now, I'd like to know so I can come up with a virtualized solution. - Packages requiring or buildrequiring, etc. any other XFree86 subpackage need to be fixed too. They're likely smaller in number, and so I'm not sure what changes might be needed to accomodate things. We'll deal with them on a package by package basis as they come up. This bug report is a tracker for these issues. Any xorg-x11/XFree86 package dependancy error should be filed in it's own individual bug report, and then marked as blocking this bug, so that we can track all of the issues in a single location, yet be able to provide closure to each individual issue. Please do not report the issues directly in this report though, use individual reports as mentioned above.
Just to clear possible confusion, this bug tracker was filed to track bugs mostly in other packages, and exclude problems related to XFree86-devel on upgrades. The middle section above entitled: "Packages that have BuildRequires: XFree86-devel" was not intended to be a catch-all for problems related to XFree86-devel issues discovered when upgrading, but rather specifically WRT the virtual provides, which is a solved issue. Some people are experiencing problems with up2date/yum handling upgrades properly when a package depends on XFree86-devel. I consider that issue separate, as we explicitly are keeping XFree86-devel around right now as a virtual package, and it is correctly stated in the spec file. Any problems with XFree86-devel dependancies should be filed in separate bug reports in bugzilla, which do not block on this bug. When we're transitioning from XFree86-devel to virtual devel provides in the future, I'll make a new tracker bug for issues that have arisen. Closing this bug as 'RAWHIDE' as all issues were fixed last week.