Re: Use with Ximian RPMs?

On Tue, 2002-07-16 at 07:38, John HEARNS wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-07-15 at 18:23, Paul Nasrat wrote:
> > > Testing package set / solving RPM inter-dependencies...
> > > There was a package dependency problem.  The message was:
> > > 
> > > Unresolvable chain of dependencies:
> > > evolution  1.0.8.99-snap.ximian.20020709 requires libpisock.so.4
> > > gnome-pilot  0.1.65-1.ximian.1           requires libpisock.so.4
> > 
> > I assume this is on the client.
> > 
> > > libpisock.so.4 is provided by pilot-link-0.9.5-ximian.2
> > > which is installed.

This is correct -- libpisock.so.4 is provided by the Ximian pilot-link
package.

> > What happens when you do 
> > 
> > up2date pilot-link
> > 
> > on the client
> > 
> I tried that - and it still complains at the 'solving RPM dependencies'
> stage.
> 
> I tried to install pilot-link just using RPM
>  rpm -Uvh  pilot-link-0.9.5-8.i386.rpm
> and again got a dependency failure 

Here is where you see the root cause of the problem.  up2date thinks
that ximian.2 < 8.

> > It may be that the current db dependancies are incorrect, check that
> > pilot-link is in your ximian directory. Stop current, rebuild the

Rebuilding the database won't help.  You have hit a bug in RPM.  When
presented with two versions to compare, one starting with a letter, the
other with a number, rpm gets confused and always returns -1, which
up2date takes as 'upgrade this package'.  So you get into a situation
where up2date always goes for the _other_ package if two are available
to it, e.g. pilot-link-0.9.5-8 and pilot-link-0.9.5-ximian.2.

The solution to this is to avoid the problem in the first place by
ensuring that you never hit the letter/number comparison which is what
we did in Ximain GNOME for Red Hat Linux 7.3.  We are phasing out
packages which trip this bug, but can only do so when the upstream
maintainer releases a new version.

Thanks.
Peter