Packaging a Fork of a Python Library (Suds)

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2014 at 08:29:41PM -0400, Scott Talbert wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Suds [1], a Python Library for using SOAP web services (Fedora
> package: python-suds), has been unmaintained for about 3 years or
> so.  There is a relatively active fork, suds-jurko [2], that has,
> among other things, Python 3 support.  Thus, I would like to package
> suds-jurko for Fedora.
> 
> Would it be better to:
> 
> A) Package suds-jurko as a new package (and then dependent packages
> could move over to use suds-jurko at their leisure).  If this is the
> recommended approach, is there a recommended mechanism for having
> multiple python modules with the same name?  Rename the fork's
> module to 'suds-jurko' and packages that wanted to use the fork
> would have to be updated to import the alternative module name?
> 
> or
> 
> B) Replace python-suds with the jurko fork and force all dependent
> packages to move over at the same time.  If this is the recommended
> approach, is this big enough to qualify as a system-wide change?
> There are about a dozen dependent packages, according to repoquery.

Total amount of work is lower in B, iff you can pull it off without
breaking too much stuff. So I'd start packaging as for B, and then
test the affected packages for breakage. If there's just a dozen,
this should be entirely feasible even for one person. If nothing
or only things which can be fixed break, then just cooperate with
the interested maintainers to handle the update nicely.

Zbyszek