Multilib Middle-Ground

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 12:29 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Perhaps, but fedora is one of the worst distributions to keep anything
> working consistently for years because of its rapid internal changes. If you
> can't use something consistent as the example for a standard, how is it ever
> going to improve?

Are you arguing for backwards compatibility inside Fedora.. or arguing
cross-compatibility across distributions? Are are you just asking for
maximal compatibility for everything?

Fedora isn't going to solve the cross-distribution problem on its own.
Fedora isn't going to even solve the backwards compatibility problem
on its own.  And its certaintly not going to solve the multi-arch
compatibility problem on its own.  This is only going to get solved if
someone who cares gets all the stakeholders talking in a constructive
forward looking conversation.  You care...but I very much doubt you
have the necessary skills to make a constructive dialog happen.

We are only going to make headway on any of this by getting the
distributions and upstream projects together and figuring out what
needs and can be standardized.  Just pointing to F7 or F8 or F5 as the
de-facto standard in the space isn't useful. Because unless upstream
developers care about backwards compatibility..we can't make them.
Unless other distros care about cross-distro compatibility we can't
make them. Making backwards and cross compatibility work in a
meaningful way is not something we can impose on the open ecosystem.

All we can do internally is to have a policy with regard to backwards
compatibilty...and we do. We have a process by which compat packaging
crap can be generated.  But if upstream developers aren't using the
symbol versioning that is needed to make it work... we can't make them
use it.

Here's an exercise for you.  Attempt to figure out which upstream
library projects care about doing backwards compatibility and are
doing the necessary things so we can make use of symbol versioning and
other technical measures to use in our packaging depchains.  That is
the starting point for a discussion for where backwards compatibility
stands in the open source ecosystem. If enough upstream projects are
not doing what is necessary to make backwards compatibility easy to
package, then there's no point in attempting to fix the problem at the
distribution level.  If enough individual upstream projects are doing
what it takes, then we can attempt to define a set of libraries inside
Fedora which form a 'framework' that users can more readily rely on to
behave when targetting their own in house code against.

But unless individual upstream projects want backwards compatibility
to matter...its not going to matter.

-jef