Daniel Mach wrote:
> From my POV, RPM Requires should contain only deps which are *required*
> for a particular package. Suggests/Recommends is really missing

AIUI, Suggests/Recommends was almost accepted in rpm.org (BTW, rpm5.org has
had it for ages), but the yum developers blocked it. :-/

IMHO we really need Suggests/Recommends support!

> and enforcing these kinds of deps via Requires is evil. What you should do
> now is to add such packages into a single comps group so they get
> installed together or create a meta-package that pulls all packages that
> *should* be installed together.

The problem with comps is that it only works for new installs, not for
upgrades.

Kevin Kofler

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On Tue, 2011-04-26 at 15:31 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Daniel Mach wrote:
> > From my POV, RPM Requires should contain only deps which are *required*
> > for a particular package. Suggests/Recommends is really missing
>
> AIUI, Suggests/Recommends was almost accepted in rpm.org (BTW, rpm5.org has
> had it for ages), but the yum developers blocked it. :-/

You are misinformed.
As far as I know "we" have never "blocked" any rpm feature.

A suggests/recommends/etc. patch has been proposed to upstream rpm, but
was rejected.
After discussion it seemed like it would be better to put that kind of
information in repo metadata, instead of the rpms directly. But it's
never been high enough on anybody's TODO to create a patch for that.

Either of those approaches would only be a very low level of support
though, you'd then need to alter yum and yumex/etc to get any kind of
use out of it.

Obviously if all you really care about is "install this for everyone,
but let people remove it again" (which is a lot of the suggests+
usage) ... you should be able to do that by adding things to a comps
group.

> IMHO we really need Suggests/Recommends support!
>
> > and enforcing these kinds of deps via Requires is evil. What you should do
> > now is to add such packages into a single comps group so they get
> > installed together or create a meta-package that pulls all packages that
> > *should* be installed together.
>
> The problem with comps is that it only works for new installs, not for
> upgrades.

I did a patch at the end of 2010 which changes that, but it's a
significant change. I might propose it again for F16.

That also doesn't affect the above use case.

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Dne 26.4.2011 15:31, Kevin Kofler napsal(a):
> AIUI, Suggests/Recommends was almost accepted in rpm.org (BTW, rpm5.org has
> had it for ages), but the yum developers blocked it. :-/

I have to defend Seth here ... in the last flamewar on this theme he
admitted that introducing Suggests/Recommends would be question of half
an hour (maybe he didn't mean it literally) and he would be willing to
do it in the moment FESCO (or Board, or whoever is appropriate to make
the decision) would tell him so.

Matěj

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On 04/26/2011 05:21 PM, Matej Cepl wrote:
> Dne 26.4.2011 15:31, Kevin Kofler napsal(a):
>> AIUI, Suggests/Recommends was almost accepted in rpm.org (BTW, rpm5.org has
>> had it for ages), but the yum developers blocked it. :-/
Well, having Suggests/Recommends in RPM only does buy you anything as
RPM will just ignore them. Yum (or any other depsolver) has the job of
selecting the "right" set of packages.
> I have to defend Seth here ... in the last flamewar on this theme he
> admitted that introducing Suggests/Recommends would be question of half
> an hour (maybe he didn't mean it literally) and he would be willing to
> do it in the moment FESCO (or Board, or whoever is appropriate to make
> the decision) would tell him so
I think if anybody can come up with a exact description how they should
look like and how they should work and can create some evidence that
this is want we need and want implementing them is not the problem[*].
Until now no one has come up with a proposal and enough confidence.

As soon as one looks at the details it becomes less obvious what "we
really want". Even whether the Suggests/Recommends should live in the
packages or in comps or else where or both or both or in all three is
still under debate. Do we need reverse relations? Do we really want to
have exactly two levels of strength? Do we need "conditionals" (install
an package only if two or more other packages are installed) as we had
(have) in comps? Or should be trash the whole concept of comps and comps
groups and start all over? When and how should they be evaluated? Do we
need to save the users decision not to want the suggested package? What
happens if the Suggests changes during an update?

If there really is some interest in getting any kind of weak
requirements into yum and rpm answering the questions above is a first
step (The list is not complete.) But from my perspective (as an RPM
developer) "Fedora" has shown little interest in developing an own
opinion about how the future of packaging and package handling should
look like. So I am not too optimistic that we'll have Suggests or
Recommends any time soon.

Florian
[*] Depending on the exact features implementing still can be tricky and
require a lot of work. I doubt that it will be even remotely close to
half an hour but nothing that cannot be handled.
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On Tue, 2011-04-26 at 18:23 +0200, Florian Festi wrote:

> > I have to defend Seth here ... in the last flamewar on this theme he
> > admitted that introducing Suggests/Recommends would be question of half
> > an hour (maybe he didn't mean it literally) and he would be willing to
> > do it in the moment FESCO (or Board, or whoever is appropriate to make
> > the decision) would tell him so

> I think if anybody can come up with a exact description how they should
> look like and how they should work and can create some evidence that
> this is want we need and want implementing them is not the problem[*].
> Until now no one has come up with a proposal and enough confidence.

Suggests: has been in Mandriva for several years, being used actively by
packagers and users, without any major problems. Yes, you can draw up
all kinds of theoretical objections and considerations, but to me the
fact of long-term practical usage rather seems to trump those.
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Florian Festi wrote:
> I think if anybody can come up with a exact description how they should
> look like and how they should work and can create some evidence that
> this is want we need and want implementing them is not the problem[*].
> Until now no one has come up with a proposal and enough confidence.

The proposal is this:

We would have 3 levels of dependencies:
Requires: = always required
Recommends: = required by default
Suggests: = not required by default

In yum, you would have 3 possible settings for "yum install/update" behavior
wrt. soft dependencies:
1. Ignore all Recommends and Suggests.
2. Treat Recommends as Requires, ignore Suggests. (The default.)
3. Treat both Recommends and Suggests as Requires.
The setting would be set in yum.conf and could be overridden through a
command-line argument, kinda like how --enablerepo works.

For "yum remove", you'd have 2 possible settings:
1. Ignore all soft dependencies during remove. (The default.)
2. Treat soft dependencies using the setting for install/update.
Again, the setting would be set in yum.conf and could be overridden through
a command-line argument.
(The rationale for the proposed default is that it allows removing unwanted
soft dependencies easily.)

In gnome-packagekit and KPackageKit, you'd have a dropdown in the settings
to set the first yum option and a checkbox for the second.

The evidence that this is what we need: This is basically how all the
existing implementations (deb, rpm5 etc.) I know of work and they've been
found to work quite well for the distros using them.

Additional features such as conditional dependencies, reverse dependencies
etc. might be useful too, but they're really orthogonal to this proposal.

Kevin Kofler

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On Tue, 2011-04-26 at 09:57 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-04-26 at 18:23 +0200, Florian Festi wrote:
>
> > > I have to defend Seth here ... in the last flamewar on this theme he
> > > admitted that introducing Suggests/Recommends would be question of half
> > > an hour (maybe he didn't mean it literally) and he would be willing to
> > > do it in the moment FESCO (or Board, or whoever is appropriate to make
> > > the decision) would tell him so
>
> > I think if anybody can come up with a exact description how they should
> > look like and how they should work and can create some evidence that
> > this is want we need and want implementing them is not the problem[*].
> > Until now no one has come up with a proposal and enough confidence.
>
> Suggests: has been in Mandriva for several years, being used actively by
> packagers and users, without any major problems. Yes, you can draw up
> all kinds of theoretical objections and considerations, but to me the
> fact of long-term practical usage rather seems to trump those.


The implementation details into the pkg managers have been repeated
issues for all pkg managers that have them implemented.

We're not making it up for our health.

-sv


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On Tue, 2011-04-26 at 19:23 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Florian Festi wrote:
> > I think if anybody can come up with a exact description how they should
> > look like and how they should work and can create some evidence that
> > this is want we need and want implementing them is not the problem[*].
> > Until now no one has come up with a proposal and enough confidence.
>
> The proposal is this:

Please read Florian's email again, and attempt to answer some/most of
the questions (a rationale for your answers might be nice too).
It should have been obvious to you that a proposal like this would have
been discussed before.

> We would have 3 levels of dependencies:
> Requires: = always required
> Recommends: = required by default
> Suggests: = not required by default
[...]
> The evidence that this is what we need: This is basically how all the
> existing implementations (deb, rpm5 etc.) I know of work and they've been
> found to work quite well for the distros using them.

rpm5 isn't used anywhere, so is irrelevant to any discussion on
anything.
apt+aptitude+deb does use something like the above, with the very
significant differences of:

1. Debian with deb+apt packaging is vastly different to Fedora rpm+yum
packaging.

2. apt-get doesn't do anything, by default.

3. deb also has the two level reverse "soft requires".

4. If you talk to random debian people nobody knows why they have two
levels, what use it is over a single level (or, if it's really better,
why not three) ... and which level is signified by recommends or
suggests (or enhances/extends). Much like rpm/yum developers.

5. Even given #1, it's far from obvious that baking these assumptions
into the packages themselves is a win.

SuSE with rpm+zypper does have recommends/suggests, and is "somewhat"
close to rpm+yum (kind of). But I don't know how much it is used ... and
I don't know what it's behaviour is. I also don't know what problems
they solve with it, and how well it solves them.

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On 04/26/2011 11:25 PM, James Antill wrote:
> SuSE with rpm+zypper does have recommends/suggests, and is "somewhat"
> close to rpm+yum (kind of). But I don't know how much it is used ... and
> I don't know what it's behaviour is. I also don't know what problems
> they solve with it, and how well it solves them.

It is possible to talk to them over email or IRC and get the details.
Someone from Red Hat / RPM developer even presented in the openSUSE
conference the last time around.

Rahul

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On Tue, 2011-04-26 at 13:55 -0400, James Antill wrote:

> rpm5 isn't used anywhere, so is irrelevant to any discussion on
> anything.

Since Mandriva and Mageia split, Per Oyvind got to be Mandriva's RPM
maintainer, and they have (not surprisingly) adopted RPM5. Not to say I
think it's a good idea, but there is one significant distro that now
officially uses RPM5.

> SuSE with rpm+zypper does have recommends/suggests, and is "somewhat"
> close to rpm+yum (kind of). But I don't know how much it is used ... and
> I don't know what it's behaviour is. I also don't know what problems
> they solve with it, and how well it solves them.

Again, Mandriva has Suggests. This is how it works. Suggested
dependencies are pulled in by urpmi (MDV's high-level package manager)
unless you pass --no-suggests, in which case they aren't. The summary
output from an urpmi operation (where it shows you what's about to
happen before it actually happens) denotes packages that are suggested.
You can always remove a package which is only Suggested (not Required by
any other package). IIRC the behaviour of rpmdrake (the GUI manager) is
more or less the same, with an option for not installing suggested
packages by default.
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