Packaging a Fork of a Python Library (Suds)

[Scott Talbert]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2014, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 08, 2014 at 08:29:41PM -0400, Scott Talbert wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Suds [1], a Python Library for using SOAP web services (Fedora
>> package: python-suds), has been unmaintained for about 3 years or
>> so.  There is a relatively active fork, suds-jurko [2], that has,
>> among other things, Python 3 support.  Thus, I would like to package
>> suds-jurko for Fedora.
>>
>> Would it be better to:
>>
>> A) Package suds-jurko as a new package (and then dependent packages
>> could move over to use suds-jurko at their leisure).  If this is the
>> recommended approach, is there a recommended mechanism for having
>> multiple python modules with the same name?  Rename the fork's
>> module to 'suds-jurko' and packages that wanted to use the fork
>> would have to be updated to import the alternative module name?
>>
>> or
>>
>> B) Replace python-suds with the jurko fork and force all dependent
>> packages to move over at the same time.  If this is the recommended
>> approach, is this big enough to qualify as a system-wide change?
>> There are about a dozen dependent packages, according to repoquery.
>
> Total amount of work is lower in B, iff you can pull it off without
> breaking too much stuff. So I'd start packaging as for B, and then
> test the affected packages for breakage. If there's just a dozen,
> this should be entirely feasible even for one person. If nothing
> or only things which can be fixed break, then just cooperate with
> the interested maintainers to handle the update nicely.
>
> Zbyszek

Zbyszek, thanks for the feedback.

Adding in maintainers of Suds-dependent packages (in case they are not 
subscribed to fedora-devel).

Hi all, I would like to propose moving python-suds to use Jurko's fork, as 
noted above.  Opinions on the matter?

Thanks,
Scott