[CentOS] How does yum decide when 2 packages meet a dependency?

Fri Jul 21 16:20:22 UTC 2017
Phil Perry <pperry at elrepo.org>

On 21/07/17 17:10, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 05:00:35PM +0100, John Hodrien wrote:
>>>> Say a package has a dependency for libfoo.so.1, and 2 (or more)
>>>> packages provide libfoo.so.1, how does yum decide which package to
>>>> install to meet the dependency?
>>> It has a series of heuristics:
>>> http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/CompareProviders

Many thanks Matthew, that's a great overview.

>> That's fabulous.  You mean Phil could have fixed my issue by renaming the
>> package priiiiiimus so that the name was longer than mesa-libGL ;)
> 
> Tragically possible. :)
> 
> 

In this case, working through the logic, it would appear that primus 
probably won the battle on the basis of pulling in fewer deps than 
mesa-libGL, but what else is already installed on the system would 
clearly have an effect here.

Still, nice to know the logic involved.