unison formal review

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 2:15 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 08:55:43AM +0200, Roberto Ragusa wrote:
>> On 09/27/2011 07:46 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/unison213
>> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/unison227
>> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/unison
>> >
>> > Instead of introducing yet another variation, can we somehow create a
>> > single 'unison' package which covers all of the protocol variants?
>>
>> Why should I install all versions if I only want the recent one?
>> Or the xxx one, for compatibility.
>>
>> Isn't there a general policy "split into many rpms, when possible"?
>>
>> Having a single executable would be great (like rsync), but that
>> is an upstream issue.
>
> They don't all need to be in separately named packages.  It's not
> beyond the realm of possibility for us to package up multiple versions
> of the source into one unison package.
>

This isn't helpful for the user's of the package.  An update to any
version of unison would mean an updated packages for all versions of
unison.

> TBH I'd like to hear what FESCO have to say about this, because AFAIK
> there is no other package in the whole of Fedora which is packaged
> this way.
>
Probably more of an FPC question.
/me dons FPC hat

IIRC, this was discussed on the mailing list a long time ago because
unison used to package only the latest version (much like Debian does
now).  Once we were made aware that the upstream for unison was not
interested in maintaining wire compatibility between any versions of
their software, we decided that separate packages for compatibility
would be the best solution that we could manage.  Is it suboptimal?
Yes.  Is there a solution with a better set of tradeoffs?  We haven't
found one yet (including the proposal which you've made which we've
already discussed and discarded).

-Toshio