Future of panel applets

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Christoph Wickert
<christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> What does this mean for me as a maintainer of several applets?

Maintainer as in spec file or upstream?  I assume you mean as spec
file.  In that case I think it again depends on the people writing the
code; if there are none or it's not going to be updated, then it
should probably just be removed from the archive.  If you mean as in
upstream, see the mail I linked to.

> I don't think so, I was rather thinking of the packaging site. We need
> to have proper Provides/Obsoletes in place for a clean upgrade.

The issue here is that if you had one of these installed,
preupgrade/yum will prefer preserving the applet package over
upgrading the OS core?  And that we work around that by adding some
Obsoletes to some random package in the core OS to trick it?  Okay, I
guess, though it feels weird.  These things are very similar to
Firefox extensions, and they have an explicit UI which says "The
following addons are no longer compatible...".

The case here is similar to applications which use non-stable API from
the base OS or any libraries from extras that changed; if those
libraries are no longer available in a base upgrade we'd need to bring
that to the user's attention ideally before the upgrade.