On 21 May 2014 17:03, Robert Rati <rrati@redhat.com> wrote:
I've been working on updating the hadoop package to the latest 2.4.0 release and at this point I've resolved all the issues but I'm now blocked by the log4j2 update.  log4j2 breaks the hadoop build pretty severely, and it doesn't seem the log4j2 team has spent much time thinking about how to provide backwards compatibility to existing log4j1.2 users.  From my investigation of log4j2:

log4j.properties file is no longer read at all
configuration file is now in XML or JSON
configuration file name is log4j2.[xml|json|jsn]
V2 isn't backwards compatible with V1.  There's a shim for v1 api but it will only work for a limited set of cases, and for some cases it does work for it turns some operations into noop calls.

This is a pretty major change and even the compatibility layer, if it will work for a project, does not seem to guarantee like functionality and minimally will require a re-do of all log4j configuration files a project ships.  I'm not sure many sizable upstream projects would undertake/accept such a drastic change very quickly.

The list of projects currently blocked by this update are:
hadoop
hbase
oozie
hive
apache-log4j-extras
amplab-tachyon

I would be surprised if there aren't a lot more.  I understand Fedora is always pushing for the latest versions, but for some fundamental packages can there be compatibility packages introduced at the same time as an incompatible update?  Package maintainers of dependent packages will still need to touch their packages and determine if the new version will work for them.  Providing a compat package will also allow packages to update to their newer versions while not held up on trying to integrate changes from a compatibility breaking dependency update.

Rob
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Yes, there are precedents for compat packages.  For example there are both jdom and jdom2 packages in Fedora for this reason. There also used to be a xml-commons-apis12 compat package (not any more though, we were able to finally retire it in favour of xml-commons-apis.)


--
Mat Booth
http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora