How do I use "suggests" in home-built rpm

[jaywalker]

This one is for any hobbyist packagers out there.

I am playing with a little home-built sound recording "manager" (sounds a bit more sophisticated than "front-end for a command line program") written with Gambas3.

As I continue to bolt on new bits I frequently encounter situations where my chief tester (and only other user) doesn't have stuff on his machine which my program uses.

I have discovered that the built-in Gambas3 rpm creator will readily accept library and font resources (for example) in its "Extra dependencies" form and these are added to the Requires line in the rpm spec file. So far, so absolutley fine and good.

The thing is I would like to be able to suggest that auxiliary, useful programs be installed if they are found to be absent. That is where I hit the snags.

1. I believe that urpmi understands this type of possibly install suggestion
2. I can't find any mention of it in rpm documentation (there was at least one email discussion four or five years ago about possibly adding it to the rpm system)
3. I don't understand how "suggests" works - I only ever see it when using urpmi from the command line and even then, only rarely - How is it managed in rpmdrake?

There's lots more I don't know, but I have embarrassed myself enough for now. Any help will be gratefully received.

Richard

[doktor5000]

Suggests are not conditionally, they will be treated as "soft" requires. I.e. you can install without them, when using --no-suggests option for urpmi.
So they generally get used for auxiliary programs, which are not essetinal for a programs normal operation, or only for additional features.
As rpmdrake internally also only uses urpmi, it is treated the same in both.

If you want to know about the internal rpm mechanics used here, search for the RPMSENSE_MISSINGOK flag and various implementations.

[jaywalker]

Suggests are not conditionally, they will be treated as "soft" requires. I.e. you can install without them, when using --no-suggests option for urpmi.

So, if I have a couple of programs as "suggests" in my spec file then rpmdrake will install them too (if not already present) unless I have a global option set for no-suggests in my urpmi.cfg.

It doesn't behave as a suggestion for this package (no opportunity to decline the suggestion), but as a requirement which, if I knew it were there, I could reject for all packages, but not for just this one, unless I use urpmi --no-suggests. But then, of course, I would have to have pre-knowledge that "suggests" were present in the package and that I didn't want them.

So they generally get used for auxiliary programs, which are not essetinal for a programs normal operation, or only for additional features.
As rpmdrake internally also only uses urpmi, it is treated the same in both.

So suggests can be useful, but are definitely not the sort of feature a newbie could be expected to be aware of, or expected to use as it requires a certain comfort in using the command line.

I think I will avoid the temptation of using suggests for the auxilliary programs my package can use and just rely on the documentation to advertise their benefit. Seems a shame. It could have been so useful if an accept/decline checkbox could have been presented in rpmdrake for those packages with suggests in their spec files.

Sadly my user/tester is not one of those who feels comfortable in a shell

If you want to know about the internal rpm mechanics used here, search for the RPMSENSE_MISSINGOK flag and various implementations.

I tried to follow the discussion but I don't yet know enough about rpm and packaging in general to make much sense of it. It certainly looks like I can get some of the answers I need there so I will perservere.

Thanks Doc.

R

[doktor5000]

FWIW: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Feature:SuggestSuggests

[jaywalker]

Wow, that is VERY good news. I will follow it with great interest (and a little too much excitement).

R