It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.
What Is Depcheck?
Depcheck was created to detect packages with broken dependencies. As the test matures, it will eventually be a part of the rel-eng process to keep these broken packages from being pushed to testing or stable repositories.
How Does Depcheck Work?
Describing exactly how depcheck functions is outside the scope of this page but the basic idea is to trick yum into thinking that all available packages are installed and attempt to install the package under test. If there are problems installing that package, depcheck assumes that those errors are dependency problems and fails the error-causing package.
For more detailed information on depcheck, there are several blog posts about its internals ([1] [2] [3] [4]).
Understanding Failures
Looking at an example log, we see the following highlight:
matahari-lib-0.4.1-2.fc14.i686 from pending has depsolving problems --> Package: matahari-lib-0.4.1-2.fc14.i686 (pending) --> Requires: libsigar.so »
In this case, matahari requires the libsigar shared library and this isn't provided by any currently available package.
Fixing Failures
Fortunately, the fixes for depcheck errors tend to be relatively straight-forward and tend to fall into one of two categories:
Add Missing Dependencies
The missing dependencies could come from packages that have not yet been built or updated, in which case waiting for those packages is a good solution. Otherwise, the missing dependencies need to be added to an existing package or a new one.
Remove the Missing Dependencies
Removing the problem-causing dependency would also fix the problem, assuming that it wasn't actually needed.
Getting Help
If you still don't understand why your update failed the test, if you think there's something wrong in our test or its documentation or if you have any other suggestions, please contact us.