[Bug 633208] Re: comparisons without release

[Per Øyvind Karlsen]

>From the one issue reported as a result of fixing this in Mandriva Linux, it in turn revealed a flaw in the packaging relying on what's generally considered as unexpected behaviour, which should rather be fixed in stead.
These cases are obviously few, easy to trigger and generally a result of  "wrong" packaging practice that's both easy to fix and should be fixed.

For the issue that revealed the bug, it's not an issue easy to find by
triggering it, and it's also a result of what would be consistent and
the expected behaviour not behaving that way, which in turn makes these
situations more plausible and easier hidden.

Analyzing metadata such as synthesis.hdlist.cz for whole distribution to fully investigate wouldn't hurt, and should probably be easy to do. IIRC we have some tools for these things in Mandriva Linux already, using the perl bindings also..
TODO++

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comparisons without release
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/633208
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Status in rpm package manager: Triaged
Status in Ubuntu: New
Status in CentOS: New
Status in Mandriva Linux: Confirmed
Status in PLD Linux Distribution: New

Bug description:
Posted from Anssi Hannula on rpm maint mailing list (http://www.mail-archive.com/rpm-maint@lists.rpm.org/msg01611.html)

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Hi all!

Currently [1], if a package has
Provides: foo = 1.2
And another package has
Conflicts: foo < 1.2-1

The conflict does not trigger, as the releases will be ignored if one of the
compared EVRs does not have it. (mdv bug #55810 [2])

Another similar case is:
A: Provides: foo = 1.2
B: Requires: foo = 1.2-2  (or >= 1.2-2)
The provides will match, which it IMHO should not be doing.

One solution that may seem obvious at first is making the comparison ignore
releases only if neither has one. However, it would break a situation where
A: Provides: foo = 1.2-5
B: Requires: foo = 1.2

So, in this "requires/conflicts/etc has RPMSENSE_EQUAL on non-released EVR"
case we actually do not want to compare the releases. So, if we restrict that
case out, we get the attached patch rpm-nonreleased-compare.patch (which I
based on [3] which comes from Jeff Johnson and Per Øyvind Karlsen, just
removing cosmetic changes and changes relating to epoch handling).

However, in addition to changing the seemingly wrong behaviour of the first
case described in the beginning of this message, the following noteworthy case
is also changed:
A: Provides: foo = 1.2-1
B: Requires: foo > 1.2
Previously this didn't match, after the patch this matches.
IMHO this change in behaviour is not wanted, so the attached patch rpm-
nonreleased-compare-2.patch restricts this case out as well.

Also, I attach rpm-compare-against-norelease3.patch (that I just came up with
while writing this) which is AFAICS functionally equivalent to rpm-nonrelease-
compare-2.patch, but instead of modifying parseEVR() to return "" for
nonexistent releases, it treats empty release of a provide as "" for a
comparison in case the conflict/require/etc has a release.

I guess something like rpm-nonrelease-compare-2.patch or rpm-compare-against-
norelease3.patch should be applied (after proper testing, of course), unless
we consider the original issues not-a-bug. I don't know which approach is
preferable (or if neither is, or if the first patch with the caveat is), as
I'm not too familiar with the rpm internals.

Please comment.

Note that all the attached patches are untested for now. The original patch
[3] was tested with 4.6.0 at the time and it seemed to function expectedly
(i.e. only with the caveat described above).

[1] didn't confirm with git master, but the code seems the same
[2] https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=55810
[3] http://kenobi.mandriva.com/~anssi/rpm-4.6.0-rpmvercmp-handle-missing-
values_1.patch