On 3/30/20 3:00 PM, Nicolas Mailhot via devel wrote:
On 3/28/20 8:59 AM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
Yes, that is an important hurdle that Fedora generally doesn't encounter at all. Fedora usually waits until the new rpm functionality is released in older versions of Fedora before allowing it to be used in rawhide.
Fortunately, that’s not the usual case. Any part of rpm that we refuse to use, before it is available in older version of Fedora, is a part that will bitrot and is unlikely to be ever used in Fedora.
Waiting does not make it more stable. Waiting makes sure the people that were interested in the feature in the first place will move away. Leaving rpm upstream with an untested feature no one wants to touch.
That would be even more braindamaged than forbidding the use of gcc features not present in older versions. At least gcc sees some use dev- side. But who is going to exercise packaging tools if packagers are forbiddent to use them?
That being said, yes Fedora has been a terrible rpm stackaholder. That has hurt both Fedora and rpm upstream. Half the NIH reinventing packaging tools people just can not stand the delays associated with rpm feature deployments.
Nicolas, thanks for this.
Indeed it's *really* hard (not to mention uninspiring and demotivating) to develop features in a setting where the first users of said feature *might* appear years in the future, at which point the feature will exists in some form in multiple releases already declared stable long ago, so its impossible to change anything, and even the simplest fixes would need to go to multiple branches and distros all at once.
So in this setting, with any rpm feature there's precisely one chance to get things *just* right. We all know how well that works with any software...
- Panu -
Regards,