[kw-pm] how to satisfy an rpm dependency of the form "perl(XX:YY)"

Robert P. J. Day rpjday at mindspring.com
Tue Dec 14 12:50:18 CST 2004


On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, John Macdonald wrote:

> As I understand it, rpm keeps a database of what has been installed
> (and also the unistall instructions and the rpm package).  That db
> of installed stuff is only managed and understood by rpm itself - it
> gets updated when you add or remove a package.  But when you install
> using CPAN, rpm has no knowledge of what you've done and thinks the
> old version is still installed.  While it would be nice if rpm went
> out and checked the version number of the actual installed software,
> to do that it would have to know how to get that version info for
> every type of installable item (Perl modules, binary programs,
> documentation, ...).  That would be an error-prone and never ending
> task for the rpm programmers.  Instead they make each project work
> out how to determine and encode the version info of its own files
> and put it into the tpm control data in a standard format that rpm
> can understand for all installables.
>
> So, your approach of cpan2rpm is probably the right direction, as
> long as it actuall works.  Alternatively, you could join the Fedora
> community and find out how they build their cpan rpms, and volunteer
> to help update them with newer ones.

at this point, i just emailed the packager (dag wieers), and described
the problems in try to do "yum install perl-Kwiki" on my fedora core 3
system.  others i've talked to seem to agree it's not a yum, rpm, perl
or cpan2rpm problem -- it's a packaging problem.

rday

p.s.  if you have a fedora core 3 system, feel free to add dag's repo
to your yum configuration (dag.wieers.com), then try:

  # yum install perl-Kwiki

things go south in a big way pretty quickly.


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