RFC: Fedora revamp proposal

[Kevin Kofler]

Olav Vitters wrote:
> Mageia packages libraries by the .so major version. So you can upgrade a
> library and then work on rebuilding all the software.
> 
> Example (library name is not too important):
>   lib64spice-client-gtk3.0_1-0.9-1.mga2
>   lib64spice-client-gtk3.0_4-0.15-3.mga3

This is a really ugly hack which has several drawbacks, e.g.:
* the one you already cited:
> Obvious drawback is making 'yum' (or whatever) intelligent enough to
> automatically remove those libraries.
(and in particular, how to ensure that it removes only old libraries and not 
packages the user actually wants which just happen to not be Required by 
anything anymore).
* the fact that this makes the package names much less user-friendly. E.g., 
soname-based package naming is particularly confusing for kdelibs, where you 
end up with kdelibs4 actually being kdelibs 3 and kdelibs5 being kdelibs 4. 
(What we use for kdelibs in Fedora is 1. suffixes reflecting the actual 
major version, not the soname version and 2. the default kdelibs has no 
version suffix at all, though it Provides: kdelibs4 and we recommend that 
packages Require/BuildRequire kdelibs4(-devel) rather than kdelibs-devel.)

I can see how Debian needs this, because dpkg doesn't handle soname 
Provides, and thus their equivalent of AutoReq relies on the versioned 
package names, but I think it is a really bad idea for RPM-based distros.

        Kevin Kofler