Archive for June 20th, 2007

Can I just digress for a moment?

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

I just want to say that I HATE HATE HATE rpm and it’s fucking broken dependency checking?

At work, we use apt-rpm so that we have a hope in hell of dependencies being satisfied when we install stuff. Our previous build of our software uses the RHEL 4.3 default version of dnotify, 0.17.2-1, but our current build needs a version we got from somewhere else, which is version 0.18.0-1. So I dutifully changed the

Requires: dnotify

to

Requires: dnotify >= 0.18

But it doesn’t matter whether I install it using “rpm -Uvh foo” or “apt-get install foo”, it happily installs the latest version of our stuff without complaining about unmet dependencies or attempting to upgrade dnotify. WTF? I tried with “0.18″, “0.18.0″ and “0.18.0-1″, all with no effect.

I did verify with “rpm -q -provides” and “rpm -q -requires” that the version numbers internal to the rpms in question agree with the file name versions and the dependencies made it into the rpm. So it’s not a case of a file “dnotify-0.18.0-1.rpm” that internally thinks it’s dnotify version 0.01 or something stupid like that. It’s just fucking rpm being fucking brain dead.

Was it the upgrade, or is the hardware dying?

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

My home server crashed again last night, sometime around 4:30am. The nightly backup either failed or didn’t run at all, but I can’t tell where it was in the process because I didn’t get any email from the cron.daily run.

Remind me again why I upgraded to Fedora 7?