[Fedora-packaging] Arch-specific Requires

[Braden McDaniel]

On Mon, 2010-06-21 at 01:01 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:

[snip]

> 2) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Requiring_Base_Package
> I suggest tweaking the examples to include the (epoch and) version and release 
> for consistency with the above.

I've added a section that articulates specific changes to the
Guidelines, including this one.

> 3) 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/NamingGuidelines#Renaming.2Freplacing_existing_packages
> Because Provides are not ISA qualified by default, both ISA qualified and non-
> qualified Provides should be added where applicable and appropriate when 
> replacing or splitting packages in order to not break dependencies.  I suggest 
> noting this both in this draft and the above NamingGuidelines entry.

I'm not sure this is the Right Thing in all cases.  Certainly if a
package's consumables can be used in a way that is not arch-specific,
there should be a Provide that *is not* arch-specific.  Similarly, there
should be an arch-specific Provide only if the consumables can (also) be
used in a way that *is* arch-specific.

But continuing to supply an arch-independent Provide just to avoid
breaking dependencies is not appropriate, I think.  Spec files that are
using arch-independent Provides for things that get used in
arch-specific ways are broken and need fixing (with respect to this
proposal).  While it may be true that (part of) the reason for this
brokenness is that arch-specific Provides are not currently generally
available, I think that just means that suppliers of such Provides and
their consumers need to be fixed together.

-- 
Braden McDaniel <braden at endoframe.com>