What to do about packaging beta, or rc as alternate installable

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 19:33 -0500, Neal Becker wrote:
> One of the packages I maintain is mercurial.  Frequently (e.g., now), there
> is a rc version available for test.  It will probably break some other package
> that depends on it.
> 
> I am thinking of a model like google uses for chrome.  I could install any of:
> 
> google-chrome-{stable,beta,unstable}
> 
> I don't think fedora uses this model anywhere.  AFAICT, in Fedora there is 
> always only 1 version available - although there could be one in updates-
> testing.

Just for the record, of course we can have multiple different packages
that contain different versions of the same source. This is permitted in
specific situations, but generally frowned upon: details are in the
guidelines. It's most commonly used to provide multiple versions of
libraries where we really want to have packages that depend on different
versions of the library.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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