[Apt-Rpm] apt 0.5.15lorg3.94a + rpm 4.4.9 problems

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Silvan Calarco wrote:

> Hi all,
> I'm currently running rpm 4.4.9 and apt 0.5.15lorg3.2. Some times ago I've
> managed to make them work together but apt-get is very slow when reading the
> packages list on install/upgrade.

Yeah, runtime probe dependencies dependencies introduced in 4.4.6 or 
thereabouts cause a lot of headache for apt which has a fairly static view 
of the package dependency set. Unless you're actually using those runtime 
dependencies in your packages, you can safely add RPM::RuntimeDeps=false 
and it'll start going a great deal faster. Otherwise, apt has to rebuild 
the full package cache from scratch on each in order to see if any of the 
runtime conditions has changed since last run.

> For this and other reasons I'm trying to upgrade the system to apt
> 0.5.15lorg3.94a but I have a big problem: though with apt-get update I get
> the packages list written into /var/lib/apt/lists, the pkg cache is not
> updated with remote packages so I cannot install any remote package.
> I cannot find any error message anywhere. Do you have any suggestion?

What kind of repository is that, repomd (with or without sqlite extension) 
or plain old apt native repository? I only use repomd repositories myself 
so it's not impossible the native repository support has gotten broken at 
some point. Does the timestamp on /var/cache/apt/*.bin change at all when 
you run "apt-get update"?

> Furthermore I get errors of this sort:
>
>  dbus: Depends: service but it is not installable
>  initscripts: Depends: chgrp but it is not installable
>  libqt-devel: Depends: rm but it is not installable
>
> I suppose these errors refer to the new executable(...) format of rpm
> dependencies (introduced beetwen 4.4.6 and 4.4.9) that is not yet supported
> in apt-rpm, would it be difficult to add support or (temporary) ignore them?

Apt knows about executable() and various other runtime dependency probes, 
but it's a long long time since I last tested it. So you're actually using 
executable() and other runtime dependencies in your packages? What does 
for example 'rpm -q --requires dbus' look like for the above case?

 	- Panu -