RFC: Soname in rpm name

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:

> Aurelien Bompard <gauret at free.fr> wrote:
> 
> > I did not know, is it possible to have a tool find the rpms that no rpms
> > depend on, and ask to remove them ?
> 
> The problem with this is that RPM does not indicate whether a package has
> "end user value" (a command line or GUI program, or a daemon), or is just
> a support library needed by said end user programs, which can be removed
> if not needed by anyone.

That's why a long time ago I proposed to have a policy that forces to use 
lib%name in case where it was a shared library used by more than 1 
application.

If these lib%name packages where designed so they would not conflict, 
smart package managers could handle them identically as kernel packages.
Or at least that was the idea back then.

Something like this will only work if Red Hat internally sticks to a 
deterministic naming policy that is coherent. Until today it failed to do 
that :) Mandrake and Debian are much better in this regard.

--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]