package, package2, package3 naming-with-version exploit

[Adam Williamson]

On 28/03/13 05:38 PM, juanmabc wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
>> I'm not sure that 'fixing' it provides any significant benefit other than
>> looking tidy in pontificating emails. I mean, what's the actual problem caused
>> by 'gnome-desktop' vs. 'gnome-desktop3'?
>
> I think its clear, and also seems clear there is not much willing to
> code/improve anything if it can be avoided.

I don't think it is clear. That's why I asked the question. Could you 
please state what the problem is?

> Both are the same package, only changes major version

Well, look, what does that *mean* exactly? In what practical way does it 
make any sense to think about them as the same thing, for a distribution?

It's only a useful way to think about them if you can share something 
significant when actually doing distribution-like things to them 
(building, issuing updates, handling bugs). In all the cases I can think 
of, that isn't true. gnome-desktop's spec doesn't look like 
gnome-desktop3's; go look at 'em. Their buildrequires are different. 
Their file lists are different. Look at the changelog: they get built on 
completely different schedules, by different people. They are not 'the 
same thing' in any reasonable sense of the phrase, looked at from the 
perspective of a Linux distribution. Ditto with gtk2 and gtk3, 
autotools-whatever...

, if from the start
> multiversion would have been integrated, nobody would have think about it
> another way.

I'm not sure that's true. I don't see that anyone would have wanted to 
build gnome-desktop and gnome-desktop3 from a single buildsystem 
repository even if it were possible. What would be the benefit?

>> That's a very trivial difference; it barely exists. The hyphen isn't
>> some kind of magical character for RPM, so the difference between 'pkg2'
>> and 'pkg-2' is entirely aesthetic.
>
> I guess this goes as aesthetic as writing in CAPS in emails, having
> grammatical errors in writing, wrong spoken pronunciation, etc. just points
> it's not correct and hence should be fixed. "I write this wrong but the
> difference is aesthetic" is well, wrong. Correctness, smartness matters.

Correctness in linguistic matters has at least some kind of external 
definition. In English it's rather squishy - let's say it's 
peer-to-peer! - but at least Fedora doesn't define the rules of English. 
Fedora defines the rules of how a Fedora package can be named. You are 
implying that the name 'gnome-desktop3' is 'not correct' (by saying 
'correctness matters'), but that is an invalid implication. It is 
correct, because it complies with the packaging guidelines, which are 
the only definition of 'correctness' when it comes to Fedora packaging 
conventions. Your proposal is not to bring an existing workflow into 
line with our existing definition of 'correctness', but to change the 
definition of 'correctness'. Ergo you cannot support your proposal by 
claiming that the current situation is 'incorrect'.

  Plus i
> feel the user experience at installing stuff would improve.

No-one actually sits down and does 'yum install gnome-desktop3', or 'yum 
install autoconf213', or whatever. These are package-to-package things. 
You get gnome-desktop as part of a group or as a dependency of a 
package; yum/PK takes care of the details of which package you need. 
Okay, there's a few scenarios in which you might manually install 
autoconf, but is anyone *really* feeling horrible about the packagename 
having some numbers in it? It seems like an extremely trivial 
improvement. Can you identify some counter-examples where it's common to 
install the package manually, and having a major version in the package 
name makes it a terrible experience to do so?

> By the way the main package is still pkg not pkg-1 or pkg-2, though some
> method of listing pkg would raise pkg-1 and pkg-2, so you can install.

That seems pretty hand-wavey, but I'd defer to Seth on that front...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net