F21 System Wide Change: Headless Java

[Stanislav Ochotnicky]

Quoting Ville Skyttä (2013-11-15 18:30:33)
> On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Stanislav Ochotnicky
> <sochotnicky at redhat.com> wrote:
> >> http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/jing-trang.git/commit/?id=6d46e64fe0f365a947c7095adaf65e8cc2c90d5b
> >
> > Ugh. Why did you have to do that?
> 
> Huh, wow, that's not at all the response I was expecting. What did you
> expect to achieve with it?

Yeah, I guess I should have omitted that first sentence. My apologies. I
consider the rest still valid though

> Anyway, I'll bite: the primary reason is because I've seen earlier
> specfile mass modifications (automated as well as done by
> non-maintainer humans) happen in a way I don't want to see happen to
> packages I maintain. And it's already been a long time since the
> availability of java-headless was announced. See also below.

It's been 3 weeks and even in that announcement thread I explicitly mentioned
guidelines not being fixed yet. But you are right, you are entitled to your own
style in your own packages (to a degree). So an opt-out system for automated
changes is probably needed.

> Waiting until their dependency chain gets fixed would have been grossly
> inefficient; there was no reason to wait for that, and still isn't.

There's a difference between deps being fixed and fixing all packages at once in
the same way.

> > That commit changed nothing because all the dependencies still have "Requires: java".
> 
> And what do you think will happen when the dependencies get fixed to
> depend on java-headless? Oh, these packages don't need any action,
> java-headless goodness just is suddenly available with them. So it did
> change something after all, no? Progress needs to start somewhere, and
> I helped by doing the bits applicable to my packages. 

I don't know what ticked me off. Perhaps because you went seemingly ahead
without any regard for coordinated effort. If you wanted to speed it up, I'd
welcome if *you* created the change proposal and drove it. If you think that 800
packages are going to get fixed by a miracle when some maintainers don't even fix
their packages that break dependent packages you are mistaken. If everyone
just fixed their packages to "Requires: java-headless" at their own discretion
I'll tell you when we'd actually notice the change: never.

I'd like to think that maintainers of those 800 packages are going to actually
make an effort but I know better from past experience. Unless their own package
is broken in serious way they won't care. It's the same in your case really, you
fixed your package so you don't care. But I care about all of those 800
packages. I just start to question why...


-- 
Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Developer Experience

PGP: 7B087241
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com