Re: do not remove arpack package from Fedora

[Miro Hrončok]

On 29. 11. 19 2:53, Conrad Sand wrote:
>  Hi Miro,
>  
>  Please _do not_ remove arpack and arpack-devel. 
Sure, please rebuilt it. Orion has started to work on it in 
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/arpack/pull-request/1

>  A lot of other packages depend on that. 
At least 49 according to the report, yes. That's why I have sent it out, so the 
dependent package maintainers have a chance to fix it.

>  Removing arpack doesn't make any sense. 
Removing packages that haven't been built for certain number of releases is a 
Fedora policy described in:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fesco/Fails_to_build_from_source_Fai...

It is not my personal quirk.

If you don't agree with the policy itself, I suggest you start having a serious 
discussion about the policy on devel mailing list (CCed). Last time I tried to 
discuss the policy on the list in this thread:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail].o...

My intent was to make the policy less strict and give packagers some room.
If the intent was not accomplished enough, I am still open to hear more suggestions.

If you don't disagree with the policy but thing that it should not apply to 
arpack, please, discuss that to. Simply saying "removing arpack doesn't make any

sense" without providing all the necessary context is not helpful.

>  If you remove arpack, you might as well remove all serious
> scientific
>  software from Fedora. 
I don't understand this statement. If we remove arpack we might as well remove 
the 49 packages. That hardly all serious scientific software in Fedora.

I realize that there are some high impact packages. That's why we should 
together strive to fix the build failure and avoid disruption.

>  Rather than providing the sole reason for the removal as "fail
> to
>  build from source", shouldn't the first effort be towards fixing the
>  affected package?  You break it, you fix it, no? 
My effort is to raise the awareness about he failure. Despite my large effort, I 
cannot possibly fix all the build failures in Fedora. If I broke arpack, I am 
terribly sorry, but I am not aware of that.

The failure is tracked in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1734942

Yet there was no movement until this e-mail. In a way, the e-mail helped.

>  Throwing out arpack is an absolute overkill, and to be perfectly
>  honest, a boneheaded and extremely shortsighted proposal. 
My intentions are to raise the awareness of the issue. Throwing anything away 
will only happen to packages where nobody cares about them. Clearly, you care 
about arpack and that is appreciated.

There are 2+ months now to do one of the following:

  - make it build
  - change the policy
  - exempt arpack from the policy

I can help with the second two, if there are good reasons given and rest of the 
contributors agree. Orion is helping with the first.

-- 
Miro Hrončok
--
Phone: [phone]
IRC: mhroncok