package, package2, package3 naming-with-version exploit

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2013-03-28 at 09:28 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> Don't forget autoconf, gcc, Samba, Tomcat, and other critical system tools.

To throw an opinion into the pot, I like the current system. It makes
perfect sense to me to consider 'gnome-desktop' and 'gnome-desktop3' to
be two different things, 'autoconf' and 'autoconf213' as two different
things, and so on and so forth. Conceptually that's what they are.
There's no time I wouldn't mind which one of the two I got, there's no
situation I can see in which it's any kind of conceptual _improvement_
to say 'they're two versions of one thing'. So far as a Linux
distribution is concerned, they are different components. autoconf is a
Thing, autoconf213 is a Different Thing. It's not really just a version
of the autoconf Thing *for the purposes of a distribution*, which is why
it's been denoted as a Different Thing in the first place.

Both the original proposal and Vit's extensions of it seem to be
solutions in search of problems; in all the cases of co-existing builds
of codebases with different APIs that I'm aware of, I can't think of one
in which it would be an improvement (or even make sense at all) to
maintain the multiple builds of each codebase within a single spec file,
git repository and so on. Again, the different builds are different
Things: it's very unlikely that we always want to build each one at the
same time in the same way, so what is the advantage in pretending we do?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net