Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 72559
RPM suggestion regarding dependencies
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:03 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020615 Debian/1.0.0-3 Description of problem: Since the developers know where to get the dependent rpms, why not make that a part of the rpm format? Simply add a list of locations where each dependency can be downloaded. If this doesn't exist, then users will have to find the dependencies themselves. Otherwise, you get many of the same benefits of utilities such as apt, urpmi, and red-carpet without the disadvantages (a centralized database, and thus not as up to date as developer-maintained packages). This feature is backward compatible, so there is no harm in adding it.
Mostly yes, but not in packages. New packages are built too frequently for any suggestions contained in packages to be useful for more than, say, a week. The trick is to associate the information with, but not in, a package. See rpmcache(8) for how this will be implemented.