Re: [OE-core] [PATCH v15 01/12] package_rpm.bbclass: Drop external dependency generator to support rpm 6

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Sun, 2026-08-16 at 16:10 -0700, Sumanth Gavini via lists.openembedded.org wrote:
> The rpm 6 doesn't support external dependency generator. Oe-core used it for
> per file dependency which was saved into pn.requires and pn.provides,but that
> hasn't been used any more since 2012 (rev:
> be40f6d0bb80274366af00461112af65687a4de8), and there were no complains or
> updates in the past 13 years, so just drop it to support rpm 6.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Robert Yang <liezhi.yang@windriver.com>
> Signed-off-by: Sumanth Gavini <sumanth.gavini@windriver.com>
> ---
>  meta/classes-global/package_rpm.bbclass | 84 +------------------------
>  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 81 deletions(-)

I think this patch is the right thing to do but it should be split into
two changes. One is the removal of support for "per file" dependencies
in the rpm backend, i.e. MERGEPERFILEDEPS=0. We can say that hasn't
been enabled/used in a long time and has performance issues. That
change is most of this commit and is only tangentially related to
disabling the external dependency generator.

The second patch is the single change to remove external dependency
generator support. There are probably other pieces which go with that
one.

Cheers,

Richard