[Fedora-packaging] Moving an existing rpmfusion package into Fedora

[Brendan Jones]

On 05/23/2012 04:44 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Wed, 23 May 2012 14:59:34 +0200, BJ (Brendan) wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been getting some conflicting advice as to what to do about moving
>> a patent unencumbered version of package that has existed in RPMFusion
>> for some time.
>>
>> The package is qtractor (a digital audio workstation/ sequencer),
>> software we'd like to showcase as part of Fedora 18's Audio Spin.
>> Removing libmad (MP3) library deps was simple enough via a compile time
>> flag and a Review request was raised [1]. Using
>> audacity/audacity-freeworld as a precedent it was suggested that we
>> rename qtractor in RPMfusion to qtractor-freeworld and have it Conflict:
>> with Fedora's qtractor.
>
> That's the way to go, IMO, provided that RPM Fusion don't disagree
> and start a we've-been-first-to-package-qtractor game. I would hope that
> they would be happy to rename to -freeworld.

Unfortunately quite the opposite, there's a fair bit of resistance - the 
package has passed review and I've since unpushed an update while we 
work this out.

By the same token I can understand where they're coming from - when (or 
if - I'm still not convinced) the bug reports come in they will have to 
deal with it in the first instance. The maintainer in rpmfusion has 
indicated he was looking to give it up, so I'll fire this scenario (with 
me maintaining in both repos back at them).

>
>> The problem here is that RPMFusion users may have their libmad version
>> silently replaced by the one in Fedora during the transition.
>
> True. There would be a window of N weeks during which qtractor-freeworld
> could "Obsoletes: qtractor<  0.5.3-3", and afterwards, Fedora's qtractor
> would be published.
>
>> One solution here is to leave qtractor as it is in RPMfusion and rename
>> the one in Fedora to something else (qtractor-free?) and perhaps use
>> alternatives to permit coexistence, removing the need for conflicts
>>
>> Is this reasonable?
>
> Not so good wrt the package naming guidelines. Also, a "yum install qtractor"
> with plain Fedora would still not work. Sure, one can "yum search qtractor",
> but it would be odd to not use the upstream name as other dists do it
> (independent of whether a 3rd party has packaged it first).
>