Policy proposal for compatibility packages

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 04:28:10PM +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jan 2008, Patrice Dumas wrote:
>
>> Why not let the packagers decide for themselves?
>
> I see it more like a guideline to the developer who is to make a decision: 
> must I publish a compat-package or can I just discard the old API? Given 
> some harsh words every here and there on breaking APIs you could easily get 
> that impression. And then s/he knows that in Fedora, we love to discard old 
> API:s.

I hope it is untrue. I hope everybody here dislikes breaking API and
ABIs and try to push the upstreams to be responsible with API/ABI.
But still, I also hope that for our packages in fedora we don't fear 
breaking API/ABI and prefer that to stay with old library used in our 
packages. But notice the difference between our packages and libraries
used by our users.

> So our community attracts people with this mindset and so forth.

Do we really want to attract people that don't care about API/ABI
compatibility? I hope not. What would be innovative in linux would be
to use libraries that keep ABI and API compatibility (like how, for 
example, gnome and libc do very well).

Also remember that fedora is also for RHEL and EPEL dowstream, so having
people that care about innovation and compatibility would be even more
nice.

--
Pat