#241 Clarification request: Acceptable use of explicit Conflicts
Closed: Fixed None Opened 11 years ago by mschwendt.

In response to: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/891952

== Short summary of the problem ==

A new package only for Fedora 17, which will conflict with Perl in Fedora >= 18.

== Longer problem description ==

A new package only for Fedora 17, perl-!ExtUtils-Typemaps 3.18, includes several manuals and Perl modules that conflict with perl-!ExtUtils-ParseXS 3.16 in Fedora 18 and newer. The plan is to add an explicit "Conflicts" tag to the new package in F17 and an "Obsoletes" tag to an update of Perl's perl-!ExtUtils-ParseXS subpackage in F18+.

The current guidelines about "Conflicts" don't comment on Anaconda (and similar dist installer tools) behaviour yet:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Conflicts

A dist upgrade from F17 (with the new package) to F18 release could run into the explicit conflict. What does Anaconda (and e.g. fedup) do in that case?

Only a subsequent update of F18 would pull in the update with the "Obsoletes" tag, but prior to that the two packages cannot even coexist due to implicit file conflicts.

== Clarification request ==

The guidelines talk about "Acceptable Uses of Conflicts" while at the same time making explicit Conflicts a "MUST NOT". Please give better guidance with regard to distribution upgrades.


In this situation, we recommend that the guidance on doing yum dist upgrades be amended to recommend enabling the updates repo (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum) and that proper Provides/Obsoletes are used for the F18 package to ensure a clean upgrade path.

We do not feel that use of Conflicts in this situation is appropriate.

(+1:8, 0:0, -1:0)

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