package, package2, package3 naming-with-version exploit

[Florian Festi]

On 03/29/2013 10:33 AM, Bohuslav Kabrda wrote:
> To me, these are very different aspects - should RPM/YUM be able to support multiple parallel versions without the naming hacks? Yes. Should Fedora as a distro support numbers of multiple versions of packages? In my opinion, we should try to keep counts of supported packages minimal, as we do now. But that doesn't really depend on _how_ we package the stuff.
> This is about providing the tooling to people who actually want to maintain these more versions in their private repositories or whatever.

Sorry, but this is not how we as an upstream project think. We calculate
the benefits against the costs. The costs of breaking/changing such a
fundamental rules as "name.arch defines an update path" is extremely
high. If there are only a few packages that require that feature and
they only benefit marginally there is absolutely no way to outweight
these costs.

If there were thousands multiversion of packages that were suffering
from these limitations and such a change would make all that pain go
away (I won't) the decision would likely be the opposite. Such situation
would also make it much easier for the users to understand the situation
as they would deal with multiversion packages on a daily basis.

But despite people wining loudly there are only a few dozen packages
barely justifying the discussion.

Florian