Re: [libvirt PATCH] rpm: Drop obsolete Obsoletes

On Wed, Sep 06, 2023 at 07:26:55AM -0400, Andrea Bolognani wrote: > 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. Consider earlier versions of RHEL-8 shipped libvirt 4.5.0, and if we rebase libvirt again in RHEL-9, an upgrade from RHEL 8.3 to RHEL-9 will need this Obsoletes condition that is being removed. A RHEL-8 to RHEL-9 upgrade path is an expected scenario to be supported.