RPM Help Needed

[David Relson]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003 22:03:10 -0500
Gyepi SAM <gyepi at praxis-sw.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 09:15:31PM -0500, David Relson wrote:
> > On Tue, 30 Dec 2003 19:42:57 -0500 Gyepi SAM <gyepi at praxis-sw.com>
> > wrote:
> 
> > It puzzles me that, all of a sudden (with MD9.2 and
> > bogofilter-0.15.13), there are now 4 perl dependencies when there
> > used to be 0 of them (with MDK9.1 and bogofilter-0.15.7).  I'd like
> > to know _why_.
> 
> Very likely, the dependency generation script got better.
> 
> > Can a requires say "db3 >= 3.3 or db4 >= 4.1" ?
> 
> Yes. That is quite common.
> 
> > > do 'rpm --showrc' for all the gory possibilities.
> > 
> > Approx 570 lines for 289 active rules, several mentioning perl, but
> > none mentioning the 3 that are being troublesome.
> 
> They would not be there. There's a dependency generation script,
> probably called 'find-requires.perl', which rpm calls and feeds a list
> of files on stdin. The script then looks at each file to determine and
> print its perl dependencies.
>  
> > Can we tell RPM to ignore the dependency?  It'd be nice to have
> > bogofilter install cleanly, without having to use "--nodeps" (or
> > whatever).
> 
> Only by listing the dependencies manually.
> 
> -Gyepi

Gyepi,

"find-requires.perl" is in /var/lib/rpm and just execs "find-requires"
which is a bash script.  Not obviously interesting :-(

BUT, /var/lib/rpm has lots of scripts.  Being interested in "%define
_requires_exceptions" I ran "grep _exceptions" and found that %define
passes a single argument to filter.sh, where it is used as "grep -v
$GREP_ARG".  Stated differently, given several "%define
_requires_exceptions" statements, only the last one's argument is
retained and passed to filter.sh.  As an interesting experiment, I'm
trying "%define _requires_exceptions" with a triple, quoted argument --
as in 

   %define _requires_exceptions "perl(MIME::Parser) perl(POSIX)
perl(strict)"

This could get interesting!

By the way, given a binary rpm how can I display its dependencies
without having to install it?

David


-- 
David Relson                   Osage Software Systems, Inc.
relson at osagesoftware.com       Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.osagesoftware.com          tel:  734.821.8800
 how can I display a