On Tue, 2022-05-24 at 10:21 +0300, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
Even if the wifi hw wasn't present during installation, or if the user doesn't use YaST, she could install "NetworkManager-wifi" later. Or uninstall it if she decides she isn't going to use wifi any more.
Again - why is indirection via an additional package needed?
Because "system-requires-wifi" is independent of NM. It would apply likewise to wicked or any other network-related software. It describes an abstract property of the system, not a concrete package.
b) how exactly is it going to help those users who got broken system during simple update?
By making sure Networkmanager wouldn't be installed without Networkmanager-wifi? That was the idea at least. If you think it wouldn't work, please explain.
As usual on openSUSE lists, the original problem was long forgotten.
It's a common thing to happen on mailing lists in general. But in this case, I didn't forget.
It is not about how to auto-select NetworkManager-wifi during *new* system installation (this is a different, although related, problem).
In the past the NetworkManager package included WiFi support. Now WiFi support was split into the separate package recommended by NetworkManager. If a user configured system to not install recommends by default, on update the user will not have NetworkManager-wifi installed and WiFi stops working. For a lot of users this is equivalent to bricking their system (they cannot as much as post the question anymore).
All understood.
In this thread was a suggestion how this can be fixed - by using split-alias which is documented on our wiki and actually seems to work (at least in my limited testing) and costs a single line in the spec file. But given the attitude "this is a self-inflicted wound" apparently nobody is interested in making this more friendly for end-users. Which is not surprising at all ...
Not sure why you're ranting against my post. I haven't said anything against the split-alias approach [*]. I was just suggesting a more general way to specify complex requirements. It's obviously too late now for the NM-wifi issue. We're discussing future improvements. Martin [1] Although I agree with other posters in this thread that it isn't ideal to use a dependency type (split-alias) that only zypper understands.