Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2015-10-07)

[Neal Gompa]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <
zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 09, 2015 at 11:38:30AM -0600, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> > On 10/09/2015 10:27 AM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> > > On Fri, Oct 09, 2015 at 09:46:11AM -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > >> On Fri, 9 Oct 2015 17:05:00 +0200
> > >> Vít Ondruch <vondruch at redhat.com> wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> This does not scale unfortunately ... and it is common excuse to not
> > >>> support it properly. IOW, I want to have package foo-1.0 installed
> > >>> side by side with foo-2.0 and I don't want to have foo1-1.0 side by
> > >>> side with foo-2.0. And this applies especially for packages which are
> > >>> designed to not conflict by design.
> > >>
> > >> Of course it doesn't scale... unless someone has figured out some
> magic
> > >> dust to make software bug free and always secure and always
> integrated,
> > >> there needs to be people supporting all those parallel installed
> things
> > >> and making sure they are secure/bugfixed/integrated.
> > >>
> > >> So, the barrier is then that if you need/want a compat package, you
> > >> must commit to maintaining it, or convince someone else to.
> > >
> > > Debian seems to have solved this problem in a much nicer way: multiple
> > > major versions of shared libraries can be installed in parallel, and
> > > manual work is not required, the version of the library is included
> > > in the binary package name.
> >
> > When you say that no manual work is required, for whom do you mean?  Is
> the
> > packaging handled automatically as well?
> Depends what you mean by automatically: debian packaging requires
> lots of manual steps. In case of an so bump the version string has to
> be updated in various places in the debian/control file. I presume
> that most people do search&replace on the file.
>
>
​At this point in time, Fedora is the only major distribution I know of
that doesn't use versioned shared library package names. Both SUSE and
Mageia do, and of course the Debian/Ubuntu family does. I've spoken to
folks working in both SUSE and Mageia (especially Mageia as of late), and
I've heard that there's a particular eagerness to find a way to have RPM
generate these versioned library names for packages.

Mageia itself has a macro that generates these names, and packagers merely
have to utilize them to get the appropriate name generation. Part of that
is because of the quirks of urpmi and supporting multilib, but I don't see
why we couldn't work with the other two distros to develop a standardized
soname suffix generator that could simply be activated as a flag on a
subpackage.

​IMO, it would be very nice if we could come together and hash out a
standardized approach to things. We've done it with %autosetup, %autopatch,
%make_build / %make_install, and a number of other things in RPM, I don't
see why we can't for this too.

-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
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