What would it take to make Software Collections work in Fedora?

[Simo Sorce]

On Wed, 2012-12-05 at 15:47 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> Would that not cause a combinatoric nightmare with having to make sure
> you had a libX11 compiled against say X number of glibc's or other
> libraries that changed in the past so that you had the correct path so
> that SC KDE-4.9 had the correct combination it wants of core stuff and
> SC GNOME-3.9 had the correct combination for it?
> 
No you always build against the latest.

But the older rpms are useful if one collection package has
Requires: foobar = 1.2.3

If then core releases foobar 1.2.4 (which is perfectly ABI compatible
and all and wouldn;t really cause issues blah blah blahg) and 1.2.3 is
not also left in the repo the collection becomes uninstallable.

Of course some people may claim that's a mistake, but the point of
collections is indeed to not have to drink from the firehose so for some
packages it would probably make sense to have a strict dependency so you
know the collection works if installed because that specific critical
package has been tested and it is know to work.

We recently introduced a similar package for freeipa that you can
optionally install and locks down dependencies tightly.
This way people that do not want to risk suffering from breackage if one
component updates before we have tested all the pieces can install said
package and nothing it requires is updated until we test all the stuff
and update it with new version requires.

This is still experimental but I can clearly see how it would be logical
for some collections to work that way. The main issue with that package
is lack of 'older' package versions in the repos, which means if you
install freeipa 'late' then you cannot lock it down because you can;t
find the exact version that is 'known to work'.

It would be really nice to be able to do this in Fedora land.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York