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

[Kevin Kofler]

Neal Gompa wrote:
> ​Then it sounds like it would make more sense to have a mechanism to
> automatically add the user-visible version number rather than the soname.
> Though, I don't quite understand what the purpose for sonames are in the
> first place, if they aren't really designed for supporting parallel
> installable stuff...

The main reason is to efficiently detect and reject incompatible 
combinations at runtime. With RPM AutoProvides and AutoRequires, they are 
also a means to ensure a package-level dependency on the correct version of 
the library.

> ​As far as I can tell, %autosetup patch application order is controlled by
> your PatchN declarations.

Which does not (necessarily) work if you are organizing your patches by some 
other criteria. E.g., in KDE packages, we typically use 0-99 for downstream 
patches and 100+ for backported upstream patches (sometimes further broken 
down into 1xx, 2xx, 3xx, … based on the branch the patch comes from). The 
numeric ordering is not always the correct one in which to apply the 
patches.

> The other criticisms are fair, but I think %autosetup comes in handy when
> you have lots and lots of patches, and you really don't need the
> conditional application.

Actually, the more patches you have, the less likely %autosetup is to do the 
right thing. And indeed, if you have few patches, it does not help much. 
Which is why I consider %autosetup to be entirely useless.

        Kevin Kofler