Bug 156406

Summary: software installer does not ask when two packages provide the same dependency
Product: [openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1 Reporter: Holger Hetterich <hhetter>
Component: YaST2Assignee: Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf>
Severity: Major    
Priority: P5 - None CC: suse-beta
Version: Beta 7   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Other Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Holger Hetterich 2006-03-09 11:32:06 UTC 
How to reproduce:  
Install wesnoth on Beta7. 

Wesnoth requires wesnoth-data-set, which is provided by both wesnoth-data-small and wesnoth-data-full.
YaST will install wesnoth-data-small, leading to a half-baken wesnoth experience.

Expected Behaviour: 
YaST should ask, based on the dependency handling, if the user wants to have either wesnoth-data-small or wesnoth-data-full, instead of choosing the first package fullfilling the requirements.
Comment 1 Michael Gross 2006-03-09 13:23:56 UTC 
Raising severity.
Comment 2 Klaus Kämpf 2006-03-11 21:01:51 UTC 
Well, the resolver is designed to resolve dependencies and create a consistent system. As it comes from ZENworks, its mostly aimed at automatic/batch processing (task based) and not interactive behaviour.
So it tries to compute a solution automatic without user feedback. The current heuristics look at smallest package sizes and smallest number of changes.

(If the solver would ask for every case where alternatives have to be decided, people would probably get pretty annoyed ;-))

So the "half-baken"  wesnoth experience can only be prevented by adding package dependencies and help the solver installing a "full-baken" experience.
Comment 3 Andreas Jaeger 2006-03-13 09:17:40 UTC 
Klaus, let's inform everybody on packagers mailing list about this.  Developers should be aware of this.

In this specific case, I expect the following to work:
Add to wesnoth.spec file:
Recommends: wesnoth-data-full
Requires: wesnoth-data-set

wesnoth-data-full should require wesnoth-data-small (it does AFAIK).
Comment 4 Holger Hetterich 2006-03-13 10:12:25 UTC 
Thank you for the explanation, Andreas and Klaus. I changed wesnoth.spec to 

Recommends: wesnoth-data-full

which should fix my problem, will check the package in the next hours.

AFAIK, this is a change of behaviour of YaST, it should be documented.