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

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-10-23 at 16:25 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 02:58:28PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> Feel free to submit a draft -- the conflicts guidelines haen't been worked
> on in several years so there's many "new" people  on the FPC.  I believe
> that mschwendt was one of the people who had a lot of influence on the
> current guideline if you'd like to get some feedback on your draft.

Well, I don't mind doing that, but I'd like to be sure there's a broad
consensus that this is the way to go first. I don't think 'duelling
drafts' is the best way to decide on what direction to go; I'd rather
make sure we agree on the direction first, and use the drafting process
simply to refine how we express that direction.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net