HEADS-UP: Transition to guile-2.0.x and a new compat-guile1.8 package

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-10-23 at 12:17 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> """
> Compat Package Conflicts
> It is acceptable to use Conflicts: in some cases involving compat packages.
> These are the cases where it is not feasible to patch applications to look
> in alternate locations for the -compat files, so the foo-devel and
> foo-compat-devel packages need to Conflict:. Whenever possible, this should
> be avoided.
> """
> 
> at sonme point we should probably clarify that section.... I can't remember
> now where we wanted the line to be drawn.  The fact that htis has been done
> in SUSE and that porting is proceeding here seems to indicate that we
> wouldn't want a Conflicts in this case.

That's funny, I was going to say the opposite...I think we should
clarify it to say that in the cases where it makes sense to have a
libfoo-compat package, there's no need to bend over backwards to try and
make libfoo-devel and libfoo-compat-devel be parallel installable,
because there's just no important use case for it. There is no reason
you'd need to compile one code base against two different versions of
the same library, so there's no case where you would need to have both
-devel packages installed simultaneously.

I think we should be strict about trying not to package multiple majors
of the same library wherever possible, but where it's pretty much
unavoidable, I think it's perfectly fine for the -devel packages to
conflict. In fact I think it's better to leave them conflicting than to
hack them up with patches to make them not conflict; that's always going
to be a hack job, nothing clean. The library thinks it's called libfoo,
not libfoo2 or libfoo-compat. I think the guidelines should reflect
this...they should explicitly say that a -devel package conflict is fine
and indeed recommended in the specific case of packaging multiple majors
of a single library.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net