On Tue, 2020-09-01 at 10:21 +0200, Ben Greiner wrote:

Hi,

Am 01.09.20 um 10:09 schrieb Dominique Leuenberger / DimStar:

...

Dear Packagers and Devs,

As we recently switched the rpm payload compression format to zstd, we had to give up 'zypper dup' compatibility from Leap < 15.2 to Tumbleweed.

As we gave up on this compatibility, it is now time to also lift the limitation of using boolean dependencies.

So far we only accepted boolean deps on Recommends: and Supplements: tags, but not on Requires:, as zypper dup could end up not being able to upgrade. Feel free to use those tags if they help you.

Cheers, Dominique

Boolean Deps Documentation: https://rpm.org/user_doc/boolean_dependencies.html

That is great news!

What if the devel packages have repos for Leap < 15.2? Do/did Leap 15.1 and SLE have such a restriction in place?

for Leap, that's something for Lubos to answer - but I'd expect this not to be a problem there (anymore). The main challenge has always been 'zypper dup' from a system with an RPM version < 4.13 that would not be able to interpret the deps and thus fail on upgrading. Leap has had RPM 4.14.1 in Leap 15.0. So even a zypper dup from 15.0 to 15.3 (presumably next upcoming) would be fine. Similar things should be valid for SLE 15. Cheers, Dominique