path: root/doc/manual/dependencies

/*! \page dependencies Dependencies

Dependencies provide a way for a package builder to require other
packages or capabilities to be installed before or simultaneously
with one another. These can be used to require a python interpreter
for a python based application for example. RPM ensures dependencies
are satisfied whenever packages are installed, erased, or upgraded.

\section dependencies_package Requiring Packages

To require the packages python and perl, use:

\verbatim
	Requires: python perl
\endverbatim

in the spec file. Note that "Requires python, perl" would work as well. If you
needed to have a very recent version of python but any version of perl,

\verbatim
	Requires: python >= 1.3, perl
\endverbatim

would do the trick. Again, the ',' in the line is optional.  Instead of
'>=', you may also use '<', '>', '<=', or '='.  Spaces are required
around the numeric operator to separate the operator from the package name.

The full syntax for specifying a dependency on an epoch, version and release
is
\verbatim
	[epoch:]version[-release]
\endverbatim
where
\verbatim
	epoch	(optional) number, with assumed default of 0 if not supplied
	version	(required) can contain any character except '-'
	release	(optional) can contain any character except '-'
\endverbatim

For example,

\verbatim
	Requires: perl >= 9:5.00502-3
\endverbatim

specifies

\verbatim
	epoch=9
	version=5.00502
	release=3
\endverbatim

The epoch (if present) is a monotonically increasing integer, neither the
version or the release can contain the '-' hyphen character, and the dependency
parser does not permit white space within a definition.  Unspecified epoch
and releases are assumed to be zero, and are interpreted as "providing all"
or "requiring any" value.

The release tag is usually incremented every time a package is rebuilt for
any reason, even if the source code does not change. For example, changes
to the specfile, compiler(s) used to build the package, and/or dependency
changes should all be tracked by incrementing the release.  The version number,
on the other hand, is usually set by the developer or upstream maintainer,
and should not be casually modified by the packager.

Version numbering should be kept simple so that it is easy to determine the
version ordering for any set of packages.  If the packager needs to separate
a release from all other releases that came before it, then the epoch, the
most significant part of package ordering, can be changed.

The algorithm that RPM uses to determine the version ordering of
packages is simple and developers are encouraged not to rely on the
details of its working.  Developers should keep their numbering scheme
simple so any reasonable ordering algorithm would work.  The version
comparison algorithm is in the routine rpmvercmp() and it is just a segmented
strcmp(3).  First, the boundaries of the segments are found using
isdigit(3)/isalpha(3).  Each segment is then compared in order with the
right most segment being the least significant.  The alphabetical
portions are compared using a lexical graphical ascii ordering, the
digit segments strip leading zeroes and compare the strlen before
doing a strcmp. If both numerical strings are equal, the longer string
is larger.  Notice that the algorithm has no knowledge of decimal fractions,
and perl-5.6 is "older" than perl-5.00503 because the number 6 is less than
the number 503.

The concept of "newer" used by rpm to determine when a package should be
upgraded can be broken if version format changes oddly, such as when the
version segments cannot be meaningfully compared.

Example of a bad format change: 2.1.7Ax to 19980531
\verbatim
  The date may be the older version, but it is numerically greater
  2 so it is considered newer :(
\endverbatim

Example of a bad increment: 2.1.7a to 2.1.7A
\verbatim
  The 'a' (ASCII 97) is compared against 'A' (ASCII 65), making 2.1.7a
  the newer version.
\endverbatim

Stick to major.minor.patchlevel using numbers for each if you can.
Keeps life simple :-)

If a Requires: line needs to include an epoch in the comparison, then
the line should be written like

\verbatim
	Requires: somepackage = 23:version
\endverbatim

You can't continue a "Requires: " line. If you have multiple
"Requires: " lines then the package requires all packages mentioned on
all of the lines to be installed.

\section dependencies_prereqs Prereqs

Prereqs are different from requires only in that a PreReq is guaranteed
to be installed before the package that contains the PreReq.  PreReq's
are used only to order packages, otherwise PreReq's are exactly the same
as a Requires: dependency.

\section dependencies_virtual Virtual Packages

Sometimes you need to make sure the system your package is being installed 
on has a package which provides a certain capability, even though you don't
care what specific package provides it. For example, sendmail won't work
properly unless a local delivery agent (lda) is present. You can ensure that
one is installed like this:

\verbatim
	Requires: lda
\endverbatim

This will match either a package called lda (as mentioned above), or any
package which contains:

\verbatim
	Provides: lda
\endverbatim

in its .spec file. No version numbers may be used with virtual packages.

Virtual packages are often used to supply file dependencies such as /bin/sh
on machines that are only partly managed by rpm. A virtual package with
\verbatim
	Provides: /bin/sh
\endverbatim
differs from a package that has /bin/sh in the %files list in that the
package can be safely removed without removing /bin/sh.

\section dependencies_automatic Automatic Dependencies

To reduce the amount of work required by the package builder, RPM scans
the file list of a package when it is being built. Any files in the file
list which require shared libraries to work (as determined by ldd) cause
that package to require the shared library.

For example, if your package contains /bin/vi, RPM will add dependencies 
for both libtermcap.so.2 and libc.so.5. These are treated as virtual
packages, so no version numbers are used.

A similar process allows RPM to add Provides information automatically. Any
shared library in the file list is examined for its soname (the part of
the name which must match for two shared libraries to be considered
equivalent) and that soname is automatically provided by the package. For
example, the libc-5.3.12 package has provides information added for
libm.so.5 and libc.so.5. We expect this automatic dependency generation
to eliminate the need for most packages to use explicit Requires: lines.

\section dependencies_custom Custom Automatic Dependency

The automatic dependency programs are found via macro expansion.  Thus
sites can very the amount of dependency processing that are performed
locally, by changing the executable/script which is run.  Dependency
processing can even be changed on a per-package basis if the macros are
defined in the spec file. To allow for maximum configurability the
dependency programs are shell scripts which can be duplicated and edited
for site specific needs.

The macros: %__find_provides, %__find_prereq, %__find_requires,
%__find_conflicts, %__find_obsoletes, if they exist, are expanded to
the name of a program to exec. For each package, the program receives
the glob'ed %files manifest on stdin and returns dependencies on stdout. The
discovered dependencies are parsed exactly as if they were found after

\verbatim
	Provides:
	PreReq:
	Requires:
	Conflicts:
	Obsoletes:
\endverbatim
tokens in a spec file (i.e. the same parser is used), so items look like
(comments added)
\verbatim
	/bin/sh			# file existence
	libc.so.6		# soname existence
	foo <= 1:2.3-4		# versioned package
	perl5(Apache) <= 1.2	# versioned namespace
\endverbatim

The default rpm configuration has only
	%__find_provides	/usr/lib/rpm/find-provides
	%__find_requires	/usr/lib/rpm/find-requires
which can be overridden (or even undefined) within a spec file.

\section dependencies_interpreters Interpreters and Shells

Modules for interpreted languages like perl and tcl impose additional
dependency requirements on packages. A script written for an interpreter
often requires language specific modules to be installed in order to execute
correctly. In order to automatically detect language specific modules, each
interpreter may have its own find-provides and find-requires. To prevent
module name collisions between interpreters, module names are enclosed within
parentheses and a conventional interpreter specific identifier is prepended:


\verbatim
  Provides: perl(MIME-Base64), perl(Mail-Header)-1-09

  Requires: perl(Carp), perl(IO-Wrap) = 4.5
\endverbatim


The output of a per-interpreter find-requires (notice in this example the
first requirement is a package and the rest are language specific modules)

\verbatim
	Mail-Header >= 1.01
	perl(Carp) >= 3.2
	perl(IO-Wrap) == 4.5 or perl(IO-Wrap)-4.5
\endverbatim

the output from find-provides is
\verbatim
	Foo-0.9
	perl(Widget)-0-1
\endverbatim

The per-interpreter automatic module detectors will normally be located in
\verbatim
	/usr/lib/rpm/{perl,tcl}/find-{provides,requires}
with appropriate per-interpreter hooks into
\verbatim
	/usr/lib/rpm/find-{provides,requires}
\endverbatim

@todo per-interpreter dependency generators are not located in subdirectories.

Notice that shell dependencies will require that all %post et al scriptlets
be processed by the find-requires. Since a shell script depends on all the
programs which it runs.


\section dependencies_installing Installing and Erasing Packages with Dependencies

For the most part, dependencies should be transparent to the user. However,
a few things will change.

First, when packages are added or upgraded, all of their dependencies
must be satisfied. If they are not, an error message like this appears:

\verbatim
    failed dependencies:
	    libICE.so.6  is needed by somepackage-2.11-1
	    libSM.so.6  is needed by somepackage-2.11-1
	    libc.so.5  is needed by somepackage-2.11-1
\endverbatim

Similarly, when packages are removed, a check is made to ensure that 
no installed packages will have their dependency conditions break due to
the packages being removed. If you wish to turn off dependency checking for 
a particular command, use the --nodeps flag.

\section dependencies_conflicts Conflicts

While conflicts were implemented in earlier versions of RPM they never 
worked properly until RPM 2.3.4 (well, we hope they work properly now
anyway).

Conflicts allow a package to say it won't work with another package (or
virtual package) installed on the system. For example, qmail doesn't work
(w/o custom setup) on machines with sendmail installed. The qmail spec file
may codify this with a line like:

\verbatim
	Conflicts: sendmail
\endverbatim

The syntax of the "Conflicts" tag is identical to the syntax of the Requires
tag and conflict checking may be overridden by using the --nodeps flag.

\section dependencies_querying Querying for Dependencies

Two new query information selection options are now available. The first, 
--provides, prints a list of all of the capabilities a package provides. 
The second, --requires, shows the other packages that a package requires
to be installed, along with any version number checking.

There are also two new ways to search for packages. Running a query with 
--whatrequires \<item\> queries all of the packages that require \<item\>. 
Similarly, running --whatprovides \<item\> queries all of the packages that 
provide the \<item\> virtual package. Note that querying for package that 
provides "python" will not return anything, as python is a package, not
a virtual package.

\section dependencies_verifying Verifying Dependencies

As of RPM 2.2.2, -V (aka --verify) verifies package dependencies
by default. You can tell rpm to ignore dependencies during system
verification with the --nodeps. If you want RPM to verify just dependencies
and not file attributes (including file existence), use the --nofiles
flag. Note that "rpm -Va --nofiles --nodeps" will not verify anything at
all, nor generate an error message.

\section dependencies_branching Branching Version

It is quite common to need to branch a set of sources in version
control. It is not so obvious how those branches should be represented
in the package version numbers. Here is one solution.

You have a bag of features that are injected into a package in a
non-ordered fashion, and you want to have the package
name-version-release be able to:

\verbatim
	1) identify the "root version" of the source code.
	2) identify the handful of features that are in that
	   branch of the package.
	3) preserve sufficient ordering so that packages upgrade
	   without the use of --oldpackage.
\endverbatim

A simple (but possibly not adequate) scheme to achieve this is:

\verbatim
	Name: foo
	Version: <the "root version" of the source code>
	Release: <release instance>.<branch>
\endverbatim

where the release instance is something like YYYMMMDD or some linear
record of the number of builds with the current tar file, it is used
to preserve ordering when necessary.

Another alternative scheme might be:

\verbatim
	Name: foo
	Epoch: <branch>
	Version: <the branch specific version of the code>
	Release: <release instance>
\endverbatim

\section dependencies_build Build dependencies

The following dependencies are available at build time.  These are
similar to the install time version but these apply only during
package creation and are specified in the specfile not in the binary
package.

\verbatim
	BuildRequires:
	BuildConflicts:
	BuildPreReq:
\endverbatim

*/