Policy when dependencies break on updates?

[David Timms]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 08.10.2008 00:18, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>> Since I'm new with packaging for a 3rd part repo I need to get
>> certain things clear.
> 
> Note that the problems you outline can happen similarly within the 
> Fedora repos as well.
> 
>> What is the policy whenever Fedora pushes new packages to its updates
>> repo and that breaks package dependencies of rpmfusion?
> 
> There are no real policies that handle this situation except "that 
> should not happen and hence packagers should do everything to prevent 
> that from happening".
For the average joe using the gui tools, ie package kit, and it's update 
notifier, I think it works out nicely enough:
- you have 10 security and 6 updates available.
- update me
- downloads, tests, updates with skip-broken capability, leaving only 
the broken ones still outstanding.
- when the metadata is checked again, joe does get told again about the 
outstanding update, but the update attempt again informs of missing or 
incomplete package.

The last bit could be a bit annoying, and the process holds off updating 
that {potential security} issue until the package becomes available.

Are there scripts available eg from fedora that could be used by 
rpmfusion to create a list of broken packages, aka fedora's, and 
automatically email the maintainer, as well as adding to the package 
creation report ? The sooner s/he knows about the issue, the sooner a 
fix or rebuild can be requested.

How common is it that a simple bump, build and push is all that is needed ?

DaveT.