rawhide report: 20080211 changes

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:15:40 +0100, Xavier Bachelot wrote:

> Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:44:52 +0300, Peter Lemenkov wrote:
> > 
> >> 2008/2/14, Xavier Bachelot:
> >>>>       perl-XML-Xerces-2.7.0_0-4.fc9.i386 requires libxerces-c.so.27
> >>>>       perl-XML-Xerces-2.7.0_0-4.fc9.x86_64 requires libxerces-c.so.27()(64bit)
> >>>>       perl-XML-Xerces-2.7.0_0-4.fc9.ppc requires libxerces-c.so.27
> >>>>       perl-XML-Xerces-2.7.0_0-4.fc9.ppc64 requires libxerces-c.so.27()(64bit)
> >>
> >>>  Is there a way to blacklist this package from the broken deps nag mail,
> >>>  or am I doomed to get it daily until xerces 3.0 is released ?
> >> One possible solution is to provide compat-xerces-c-2.7.0.
> > 
> > As the topic of "compat-" packages has come up elsewhere, too, recently,
> > please think carefully whether to introduce either
> > 
> >   xerces-c27
> > 
> > or:
> > 
> >   compat-xerces-c
> > 
> > The compat- packages normally do not offer any -devel files you could use
> > to (re)build other packages with. They are solely for binary compatibility
> > with available packages, regardless of whether within Fedora or provided
> > by a 3rd party. That's what the term "compatibility" means in this case.
> > And we should not confuse the notion with multiple parallel installable
> > versions of a library and its corresponding -devel packages. If you
> > considered a compat-xerces-c-devel-2.7.0, that kind of defeats the purpose
> > of compat- packages, and you could as well drop the "compat-" prefix from
> > the package namespace and append the SONAME version to the base name, as
> > in "xerces-c27" and "xerces-c27-devel".
> > 
> 
> Are there any guidelines or howto for building compat package ?
> I'm not sure a compat package is of much use here, but it'll still be 
> something new to learn, so I'm willing to try.

Create a spec as if you package a library as usual.

Choose "compat-%{name}XY" as the basename for all packages, where XY
is derived from the library version or the SONAME major version.

Delete or %exclude any files that would go into the -devel package.

Include only files needed at run-time.

Make sure the binary rpms can coexist with all other packages versions
of the library.

If the compat- package is supposed to replace/rename a release of the
library with a different package name, don't add any Obsoletes/Provides,
because there is an sane upgrade path for the old library package namespace.
Example: libfoo*-2.0 --> compat-libfoo2-2.0 + libfoo*-3.0