RFC: Fedora revamp proposal
Kevin Kofler
kevin.kofler at chello.at
Tue Mar 5 22:26:57 UTC 2013
Olav Vitters wrote:
> Mageia packages libraries by the .so major version. So you can upgrade a
> library and then work on rebuilding all the software.
>
> Example (library name is not too important):
> lib64spice-client-gtk3.0_1-0.9-1.mga2
> lib64spice-client-gtk3.0_4-0.15-3.mga3
This is a really ugly hack which has several drawbacks, e.g.:
* the one you already cited:
> Obvious drawback is making 'yum' (or whatever) intelligent enough to
> automatically remove those libraries.
(and in particular, how to ensure that it removes only old libraries and not
packages the user actually wants which just happen to not be Required by
anything anymore).
* the fact that this makes the package names much less user-friendly. E.g.,
soname-based package naming is particularly confusing for kdelibs, where you
end up with kdelibs4 actually being kdelibs 3 and kdelibs5 being kdelibs 4.
(What we use for kdelibs in Fedora is 1. suffixes reflecting the actual
major version, not the soname version and 2. the default kdelibs has no
version suffix at all, though it Provides: kdelibs4 and we recommend that
packages Require/BuildRequire kdelibs4(-devel) rather than kdelibs-devel.)
I can see how Debian needs this, because dpkg doesn't handle soname
Provides, and thus their equivalent of AutoReq relies on the versioned
package names, but I think it is a really bad idea for RPM-based distros.
Kevin Kofler
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