Advice about upstream using old libraries

[Will Benton]

Hi Javi,

Unfortunately, the hard thing (#1) is almost always the right thing to do, since it can be difficult to get backwards-compatibility versions of libraries accepted into Fedora.  In the case of Thrift in particular, I believe that older versions have some firm dependencies that are no longer available in Fedora, so it might be hard to make the backwards-compatibility version in any case.  Thrift can be a big pain for packagers, since projects seem to freeze on the version that worked when they started using it.  In some cases, we've been able to carry patches against packages to make them work with recent versions of Thrift, so it might not be a terrible effort to make a fix -- and, if the community is interested, you could get such a patch upstream.


best,
wb

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Javi Roman" <jroman.espinar at gmail.com>
> To: "Fedora Big Data SIG" <bigdata at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 4, 2015 2:33:14 AM
> Subject: Advice about upstream using old libraries
> 
> Hello!
> 
> I'm working on some packages in my personal Github account [1] (Apache
> Storm, Apache Kafka and Apache Flume). Maybe it could be useful for
> this SIG when they are ready :-)
> 
> Meanwhile I have run into a problem and I need some advice:
> 
> The Apache Flume upstream code is using a old library (Apache Thrift
> v0.8.0) however Fedora packages are using Apache Thrift 0.9.1 since
> log time ago [2]. The problem is the v0.9.1 version breaks the
> upstream building [3], and nobody is working in the issue right now.
> 
> The question is about the steps or procedure from a Fedora packager
> point of view:
> 
> 1. Try to fix the break code by myself, or working with the upstream
> people in order to fix it (probably complex task).
> 2. Try to package the older version of the library and make it
> available in the fedora packages repository.
> 
> any advice about this?
> 
> Many thanks!
> 
> 
> [1] https://github.com/fedora-bigdata-rpms
> [2] https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/thrift
> [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLUME-2531
> 
> --
> Javi Roman
> es.linkedin.com/in/javiroman
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