On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Tom Berkley wrote: > Trying to avoid --nodeps?? Never, never, never use nodeps is the > fundamental rule with rpm's. If you used that option just once in an > upgrade, you hosed the upgrade. If you do an upgrade manually then you > have to go thru the entire list of dependenciesand install them until > you can install the packages that you want. NEVER means NEVER not > sometimes or most of the time. Just pretend that the --nodeps option > does not exist unless you get your kicks fixing broken software then use > it all you want butplease don't bother me with your problems. This is correct when all the packages are from one source, one repository, no upgrades, etc. However, we don't live in a perfect world. Mandrake is not the only repository. And Mandrake issues a new version of its repository from time to time. I agree --nodeps is usually a bad thing. It is not to be used unles there is any other option. However there are some cases where --nodeps is necessary. The first case is when you compile a library on your own, and you know what you are doing. Building a dummy rpm package to satisfy this dependency does not really help, because it won't get removed automatically when you uninstall the original library, etc. And there are a couple of other cases. For instance: I was trying to install kde2 on my system. As mentioned before, Mandrake didn't give a special upgrade packages of kde2, they simply gave the kde2 packages of Mandrake 7.2 as the standard kde2 packages for Mandrake. (this is probably not the least worse option). kdelibs-2.0 required libmesa. fine, I downloaded libmesa as well, and tried to install. but this one required mesa-kernel -- the kernel modules of mesa (I probably got the package names wrong a bit). I really didn't feel like upgrading the kernel package at that time, so I used --nodeps for the installation of the libmesa package alone. Even if I had downloaded and installed the kernel package, I still wouldn't have used it (I compile my own kernel), so even though the dependency was satisfied in the RPM database, the kernel module could not have loaded anyway. This is one of those special cases, where after thinking for a while, I realized that it using the --nodeps hammer would do more help than damage. Of course I didn't even think of installing kdelibs with --nodeps. This would have meant that any kde app simply would not have been able to load. This is generallythe case with any dependency of *.so.* (and the general rule). That is why I verified not only the package that contains xcalc, but also all the packages of libraries in 'ldd xcalc'. I assume that if xcalc and a host of other legacy X apps would have been broken with Xlibs of XFree 4, I wouldn't be the first one to notice that. So can anybody think of what am I missing here? -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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