[wpkg-users] Strict depend/chain checks or conflicts on 1.3.1?

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Marco,

On 19.06.2014 14:58, Marco Gaiarin wrote:
> And i've just upgraded from 4.1.1.2 to 4.1.6.2. WPKG exit with an
> error, AFAI've understood because there's a bad interaction between
> 'chain' and 'depend'.
>
> What i'm missing? Thanks.

It looks like you're facing a very special case of cyclic redundancy du to 
cyclic usage of dependency and chain.

WPKG will in your case obviously first apply the libreoffice-help-it package 
which is very likely directly assigned in profile.

During the installation of libreoffice-help-it WPKG discovers the dependency and 
will add the libreoffice-help-it package to internal "already processed" list in 
order to avoid cyclic includes. Then WPKG proceeds with installation of 
libreoffice package. During the course of installation of the libreoffice 
package it will of course descend into the jre dependency and install this one. 
After jre installation it returns to libreoffice commands and installs it 
successfully.
Moreover WPKG will proceed during libreoffice installation with the chained 
package libreoffice-help-it. And here the thing which you likely didn't 
understand happens. WPKG internally detects that libreoffice-help-it has already 
been processed during this session (well, actually it's in the middle of it but 
WPKG would enter vicious circle now entering installation of libreoffice-help-it 
again). So WPKG detects that libreoffice-help-it is already processed and 
obviously not properly processed since still old version is installed. Then it 
presents an error about failed chain installation.

Since 'chain' is not a hard dependency WPKG will still report successful 
installation of libreoffice package since all checks succeed correctly.


Now you need to remember that the libreoffice installation did happen actually 
as a sub-processing of libreoffice-help-it package (its dependency). So WPKG 
continues with installation of libreoffice-help-it now which can proceed as 
normal since all dependencies (including libreoffice-help-it) installed properly.

Note that in your log on line 1318 it correctly proceeds with installation of 
libreoffice-help-it install commands and even correctly succeeds.


The result at the end is a completely updated system including libreoffice and 
libreoffice-help-it packages. Even though an error is reported due to internal 
dependency cycle.

In order to fix this you should either remove the chain or dependency from your 
packages.


My recommendation would be to remove the chain instruction from libreoffice 
package and keep the dependency. This way you can simply assign the 
language-specific package (libreoffice-help-it) to the profile and it will pull 
libreoffice into the package tree automatically. Also this preserves hard 
dependency of the language pack to the core libreoffice package and will fail 
it's installation in case the core libreoffice package is not applied properly.


So finally it's a bit tricky to analyze but I don't think there is anything 
wrong in the way WPKG processes the packages as it is strictly needed by WPKG to 
ignore the 'chain' in this case in order not to enter cyclic dependency 
processing. Moreover the packages should have been applied 100% correctly even 
with the error reported. So the algorithm applied by WPKG did sort it out properly.


br,
Rainer