On Jun 21, 2008, at 7:16 AM, devzero2000 wrote:

> Two naive/luser questions :
>
> - how to reproduce, i think it is necessary,  the deb soft deps <->  
> rpm upstream  (e.g. not the SuSe ) soft deps translation ? Do you  
> thinks exists 1-1 corrispondence ?
>

Debian Suggests: and Recommends: end up as a message displayed
during install afaik (I can point to a post from Gustavo Niemeyer saying
exactly that if necessary).

Enhances: ends up as merge of metadata from the package containing
the Enhances: to the another package that is mentioned. That merge
can be undertaken whenever there is a clear RPM usage case.

In the far narrower context of adding --deb:contains spewage, or  
possibly attempting
to teach rpmbuild how to produce *.deb packages, there are only syntax,
not semantic, issues. What dpkg/apt do with "soft" dependencies is
up to the dpkg/apt implementation, providing a means to specify the
"soft" dependencies within specfiles, and generating the debian/ 
control file
accurately, are the only issues for rpmbuild.

> - This is histerical i suppose, so sorry in advance : if it is  
> possible to translate file  deps to package deps, the only deps deb  
> know, why are rpm file deps necessary ? Or, posted in other way,  
> the rebutal nr. 7 of "Reply: Top 10 Problems with RPM" (http:// 
> tinyurl.com/6p9emx)  is it always valid for you ?
>

RPM file dependencies are not "necessary". They are useful for many  
reasons, mostly
because package names cannot be reliably determined when building a  
package
in general.

I still believe that this engineering statement is valid and accurate  
today:

RPM computes a “contains” relationship to map all — package, soname,  
file, foo(bar), … — dependency tokens to the package that resolves  
the dependency. The cost of the mapping is quite modest using any  
standard technique (rpm uses bsearch because of portability) to  
associate a key with a value. Add –stats to any rpm command to  
measure the overhead for your specific benchmark.



Apologies for the formatting, I haven't a clue, either then or now,  
what to do with RTF.



73 de Jeff