Advice about upstream using old libraries

[Javi Roman]

Many thanks for your answers.

I'm going to try patch Flume with Fedora Thrift version, I'm agree
that is probably the best way, I guess people at upstream is not
working on it. This is a blocking issue in order to include Flume in
Fedora package repositories.
--
Javi Roman
es.linkedin.com/in/javiroman


On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 7:20 PM, Mikolaj Izdebski <mizdebsk at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 01/04/2015 09:33 AM, Javi Roman wrote:
>> 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.
>
> There is no universal aswer here, the right choice depends on number of
> factors, including:
> - is the old version still maintained by upstream?
> - is it difficult to port to newer version?
> - would upstream eventually accept the patch?
> - are there other packages that require older version?
> - what impact has using different version than upstream? (estimate)
> - ...
>
> Usually it's best to start with 1st option and fall back to 2nd one if
> there are some problems. My algorithm in most cases is:
> - check if upstream already tried to update to newer verion
> - if not then attempt to prepare the patch yourself
> - if it's too hard to prepare patch, fallback to creating compat package
> - build and test rpm package with the patch created
> - send the patch upstream
>
> --
> Mikolaj Izdebski
> Software Engineer, Red Hat
> IRC: mizdebsk
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