Bug 137394 - RPM Self-Suggest: field
Summary: RPM Self-Suggest: field
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
Classification: Red Hat
Component: rpm
Version: 3.0
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jeff Johnson
QA Contact: Mike McLean
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2004-10-28 01:41 UTC by Tim Nelson
Modified: 2007-11-30 22:07 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Enhancement
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2004-10-31 08:32:26 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:


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Description Tim Nelson 2004-10-28 01:41:26 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510

Description of problem:
Here's an idea: We could have a "Self-Suggest" header with package. 
For example, the "Self-Suggests" header for the php-mysql would read
"php, mysql".  The reason why you would want something like this is so
that, if both PHP and MySQL are installed, then the php-mysql package
is likely to be wanted too.  The reason I name it that is because it
suggests itself when it sees these things.  

The reason I suggest this is that there seems to be the potential for
an increasing number of "glue" packages (eg. join logwatch and mysql,
logwatch and squid, logwatch and apache, bind and ldap, bind and
postgresql..... (and on and on for a loooong time)), and finding the
glue packages would be much easier if we could type "up2date --dry-run
--suggest", which would generate a list of all suggestions, or
"up2date --suggest bind", which would install all packages which are
suggested by bind (ie. list "bind" in their self-suggests field), and
have their other prerequisites installed.  

It would be good to allow multiples of this header.  For example, you
might want a package that lists:
Self-Suggests: perl-DBI perl-DBD-Pg
Self-Suggests: perl-DBI perl-DBD-MySQL
...and want to require each collection as a group, but don't want to
require *both* Pg and MySQL.

If this bug would be better filed against up2date, please let me know.
 But I thought that a prerequisite to making it work in up2date would
be adding the header in RPM.

Comment 1 Jeff Johnson 2004-10-31 08:32:26 UTC
There is no way to impose a Self-suggests convention for choosing names
on existing *.rpm packages. Your rule works only for some cases,
not all.

Comment 2 Tim Nelson 2004-10-31 22:34:15 UTC
I'm happy if you guys decide not to implement this, but I want to
ensure that I've communicated properly.  I realised in retrospect that
I didn't state the idea very well.  

First imagine that a package suggests itself if all prerequisites are
installed.  But this isn't really what's wanted.  For example, it's
probable that although all prerequisites for XFree86 might be
installed, the user wouldn't actually want XFree86 unless they
selected it or something which depends on it.  Whereas if they install
both php and mysql, it's probable that they want the php-mysql
package.  That's the problem I'm attempting to solve with the
"Self-suggests" header.  If you can think of a better way to solve it,
I'd be even happier.  

Since I'm commenting anyway:

> There is no way to impose a Self-suggests convention for 
> choosing names on existing *.rpm packages. 

I'm unsure what you're saying here.  If you're talking about
retrofitting Self-suggests onto existing RPMs, my thought was that
Self-suggests would be entirely optional, as only some packages would
want it.

I should also make clear my assumption that Self-suggests interacts
with "provides".  So it's not really "if these packages are
installed...", but "If these RPM thingies are provided...".  

If you're saying that package names are non-standard, that's no
different than the problem you encounter now with Requires/Provides. 
This just adds a third element.    

> Your rule works only for some cases, not all.

Great!  If we've identified some cases where it doesn't work, then
there may be an even better solution just around the corner!  Are you
willing to identify one of these cases so that I can think about them
too?  

Thanks,


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