On Tue, 2012-10-23 at 16:25 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 02:58:28PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Tue, 2012-10-23 at 12:17 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
""" Compat Package Conflicts It is acceptable to use Conflicts: in some cases involving compat packages. These are the cases where it is not feasible to patch applications to look in alternate locations for the -compat files, so the foo-devel and foo-compat-devel packages need to Conflict:. Whenever possible, this should be avoided. """
at sonme point we should probably clarify that section.... I can't remember now where we wanted the line to be drawn. The fact that htis has been done in SUSE and that porting is proceeding here seems to indicate that we wouldn't want a Conflicts in this case.
That's funny, I was going to say the opposite...I think we should clarify it to say that in the cases where it makes sense to have a libfoo-compat package, there's no need to bend over backwards to try and make libfoo-devel and libfoo-compat-devel be parallel installable, because there's just no important use case for it. There is no reason you'd need to compile one code base against two different versions of the same library, so there's no case where you would need to have both -devel packages installed simultaneously.
I think we should be strict about trying not to package multiple majors of the same library wherever possible, but where it's pretty much unavoidable, I think it's perfectly fine for the -devel packages to conflict. In fact I think it's better to leave them conflicting than to hack them up with patches to make them not conflict; that's always going to be a hack job, nothing clean. The library thinks it's called libfoo, not libfoo2 or libfoo-compat. I think the guidelines should reflect this...they should explicitly say that a -devel package conflict is fine and indeed recommended in the specific case of packaging multiple majors of a single library.
Feel free to submit a draft -- the conflicts guidelines haen't been worked on in several years so there's many "new" people on the FPC. I believe that mschwendt was one of the people who had a lot of influence on the current guideline if you'd like to get some feedback on your draft.
Well, I don't mind doing that, but I'd like to be sure there's a broad consensus that this is the way to go first. I don't think 'duelling drafts' is the best way to decide on what direction to go; I'd rather make sure we agree on the direction first, and use the drafting process simply to refine how we express that direction.