Bug 1192182 - Tracker: issues caused by poor ambiguous provides resolution
Summary: Tracker: issues caused by poor ambiguous provides resolution
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: dnf
Version: 23
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
unspecified
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Packaging Maintenance Team
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On: 1183835 1192189 1197135 1349743
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2015-02-12 19:11 UTC by Adam Williamson
Modified: 2016-06-24 07:03 UTC (History)
9 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2016-01-06 20:24:15 UTC
Type: Bug
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)


Links
System ID Private Priority Status Summary Last Updated
Red Hat Bugzilla 1266761 0 low NEW [RFE] Add option to allow users to select from multiple providers of a Requirement at depsolve time 2021-02-22 00:41:40 UTC

Internal Links: 1266761

Description Adam Williamson 2015-02-12 19:11:36 UTC
As we've now hit at least a couple of different significant/interesting issues caused by DNF's handling of ambiguous provides: situations, I'm filing a tracker bug.

For clarity, by 'ambiguous provides' I mean this sort of case:

dog requires ball
greenball provides ball
redball provides ball

The package manager has to decide whether to install greenball or redball when the user asks for dog; how does it decide which to go with?

yum has a relatively sophisticated heuristic for handling these cases - YumBase._compare_providers() - while DNF has nothing comparable and tends to handle such cases in a way that can reasonably be described as 'worse'.

Comment 1 Honza Silhan 2015-03-24 14:42:29 UTC
Hi Adam, can you reevaluate the provide selection bugs with libsolv-0.6.8-3 and eventually close them, please?

Comment 2 Adam Williamson 2015-03-26 01:17:14 UTC
I'll try and find some time to re-test, yup. Thanks for the build.

Comment 3 Jan Kurik 2015-07-15 14:33:31 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 23 development cycle.
Changing version to '23'.

(As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 23 development
cycle bugs. We are very sorry. It will help us with cleanup during Fedora 23 End Of Life. Thank you.)

More information and reason for this action is here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora23

Comment 4 Honza Silhan 2016-01-06 20:24:15 UTC
The algorithm of libsolv has been improved in version 0.6.14 by trying to find the smallest set of dependencies available along with other heuristics. Moreover there is a guideline [1] where you can prefer one package over another. I am closing this, feel free to reopen and report other issues you encounter.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=PackagingDrafts/ProvidesPreferences


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