Re: [libvirt PATCH] rpm: Drop obsolete Obsoletes

On Wed, Sep 06, 2023 at 11:07:10AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > On Wed, Sep 06, 2023 at 11:31:10AM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote: > > All platforms we target come with at least libvirt 6.0.0, so > > none of the Obsoletes referring to earlier versions are useful > > at this point. > > This rationale assumes that the upgrade is merely an > refresh of the current install. If a user is coming > from an earlier platform version to a modern platform > version, that original platform is likely unsupported, > but we still want the upgrade path to resolve these > obsoletes. I'm happy to drop this patch as the impact of the cleanup is pretty small anyway, but generally speaking I don't think that we should aim to support scenarios such as the one you describe. If someone is going from, say, Debian 10 to Debian 11, and they want to move to an even newer version of libvirt than the one shipped with the OS, this is what will happen: * they will start with the version in Debian 10 (5.0.0); * they will upgrade the system to Debian 11, which will bring the version of libvirt up to 7.0.0, obsoleting packages as necessary in the process; * they will build the latest version of libvirt from source and install it. Trying to jump from 5.0.0 to the latest upstream version without going through 7.0.0 will require additional steps and generally be fiddly as heck, for no obvious advantage. With that in mind, I think my patch is perfectly good and does nothing to harm the experience of someone upgrading from a platform that we no longer target to one that we still do.