Preventing dependency breakage

Fedora has a increasingly large number of software packages.

# yum repolist
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit, remove-with-leaves
repo id repo name status
livna rpm.livna.org for 11.91 – i386 enabled: 3
rawhide Fedora – Rawhide – Developmental packa enabled: 15,078
rpmfusion-free-rawhide RPM Fusion for Fedora Rawhide – Free enabled: 469
rpmfusion-nonfree-rawhide RPM Fusion for Fedora Rawhide – Nonfre enabled: 122
repolist: 15,672

That’s a impressive number of packages and growing at a very fast rate. Good news for everyone. However dependency breakage is not that uncommon.

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F11/FEDORA-2009-10088?_csrf_token=0e53ac11a223380d5c82fcad8d18a816da59454c

http://mso-chronicles.blogspot.com/2009/09/broken-deps-libassso3.html

That’s not good news for anyone. It reduces trust in the Fedora Project and people blame the maintainers or even worse, they blame yum for it. It is not reasonable to expect maintainers to do a perfect job. We really need to ensure that absolutely no packages get pushed out without a basic dependency check. It does not matter whether it is a security update. It does not matter that it will take a few hours or even a day more. I don’t want to see another dependency breakage when using the official Fedora repositories. Never again.