On Jul 7, 2008, at 7:35 PM, Dmitry V. Levin wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 07:10:59PM -0400, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> [...]
>> E.g. here are the immediate precursors of the bash package:
>>
>>     $ rpm --needswhat bash
>>     bash-3.2-22.fc9.i386
>>     coreutils-6.10-25.fc9.i386
>>     glibc-2.8-3.i686
>>     ncurses-5.6-16.20080301.fc9.i386
>>     ncurses-libs-5.6-16.20080301.fc9.i386
>>
>> IOW, those packages need to be installed to satisfy bash  
>> dependencies.
> [...]
>> E.g. Should --needswhat/--whatneeds display all, rather than just
>> adjacent, package nodes?
>>
>> Adding the necessary looping isn't very hard, but I need some luser
>> input first.
>
> From one side, recursive --needswhat looks useful for such tasks as
> requirements closure.
>

Does recursive mean "all nodes that need"? I've only done the adjacent
nodes, I can certainly continue to root/leaf nodes as needed, its  
just a loop.
Easy enough to do in scriptie too.

(aside) Perhaps there's a need for --needsall/--allneeds in addition  
to --needswhat/--whatneeds.
Another alternative is to add --adjacentcount, where recursion  
proceeds until found or adjacency
metric exceeds --adjacentcount arg. All very doable.

> From another side, it is not obvious how recursive --needswhat should
> traverse virtual packages where more than one alternative is  
> available.
>

Except for multilib (which I personally don't use), what categories  
for multiple provides exist?

All that is needed is criteria for preferring a Provides:. Even for  
multilib, there is now %_prefer_color which
can be added to display the "preferred" answer if necessary. Should I  
implement?

Note also that the examples I've given for --needswhat/--whatneeds  
are slyly/implicitly dependent
on whatever packages are already installed, which is likely to be  
whatever was "preferred".

A general answer for "preferred" is more complex however ...

Thanks for comments.

73 de Jeff