Currently, RPM provides a BuildRequires build time dependency check which mandates that a package be present on the same system in order to create another package.

Additionally, RPM also provides a Requires runtime dependency check which mandates that a package be present on the same system in order to execute another package.

In both cases a package can be specified down to a granularity of a specific name-version-release (NVR) of a package.

However, during runtime, since a particular Dogtag instance may optionally rely upon components which may be located remotely on a network rather than residing locally on the same machine (e. g. - a TPS relying upon a certain version of a KRA or TKS, or any Dogtag PKI subsytem which relies upon a remote 389 directory server), it would be useful to provide a mechanism whereby packages could identify themselves by their NVR such that they could be checked against a required network runtime NVR value for that package.

In the event that a minimum network runtime NVR is not fulfilled, this would allow the requesting PKI subsystem to fail gracefully while notifying the user with an informative message.

Since it may be unknown whether the service request is from a remote or local package, this feature would probably need to become a part of the communication protocol between the two packages.

Proposed milestone: 10.3