Re: [Rule-list] Help needed for distro_analyzer and self dependencies

[Ed Blackman]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 02:50:25AM +0200, Martin Stricker wrote:
> Ed Blackman wrote:
> > Is bash the only example?  If so, I would suggest adding a special
> > case in the database generation script to avoid it.
> 
> Not helpful at all, but: I would like to avoid "special cases" as it
> might lead to very much special cases in the end.

I definitely agree with the sentiment, but I think this case is really
special, and I don't think that there's an alternative.

> It might be better to find out first what weird things RPM is doing.
> Is someone here subscribed to the Red Hat RPM list and can ask over
> there, please?

It would be nice to have an more authoritative explanation, but I
think that they're going to tell us that:

- bash has install and uninstall scripts, which prompts rpm to
  automatically insert a requirement for /bin/sh
- during normal rpm operation, rpm can figure out that the bash
  package is going to install /bin/sh, so there's no need to
  explicitly list the fact that bash provides /bin/sh

So our solutions can only be:
1) Treat bash as a special case, and insert "provides /bin/sh" into
   database.
2) Insert every file from every RPM into our database, and change the
   script so that it also looks at files.

The disadvantage of 1 is that it's a special case.  The disadvantage
of 2 is that it will bloat our database up to about 50 or 60 megs
(judging by the size of the RH rpmdb-redhat package, which contains
about the same information).

Ed

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