Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Orion Poplawski]

On 09/15/2015 10:14 AM, Ben Rosser wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net
> <mailto:linux at cmadams.net>> wrote:
> 
>     Once upon a time, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org
>     <mailto:mattdm at fedoraproject.org>> said:
>     > A. Things that I care about keeping up to date are always moving too
>     >    slowly.
>     >
>     > B. Things that I care about keeping stable are always moving too quickly.
>     >
>     > C. Things that I don't care about shouldn't bother me by having bugs,
>     >    security holes, changes in interface or functionality, or security
>     >    updates.
>     >
>     > D. And, for every value of "I", each set of _things_ is unique.
> 
>     Shoot, not just for every value of "I", for every combination of "I" and
>     "this system".  I have RHEL/CentOS systems where customer X wants new
>     PHP but old MySQL, and customer Y wants stable PHP but new MariaDB.
> 
>     --
>     Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net <mailto:linux at cmadams.net>>
>     --
>     devel mailing list
>     devel at lists.fedoraproject.org <mailto:devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
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> 
> 
> The only real "solution" to this, to the extent that there is one, is better
> support to have multiple versions of at least some things install-able either
> in parallel or at least, if not in parallel than being able to choose between
> version X and version Y of at least some software.
> 
> I realize this isn't a terribly realistic solution (among other things, we
> don't have the manpower to make it happen). But still:
> 
> For Python, for instance, we currently support this. (So does basically
> everyone else). You can have Python 2.x and/or Python 3.x installed at the
> same time.

Other than the large python2/3 split, you don't.  There's no way in the python
import statement to specify a version of the module you want, so there's no
way to provide both python2-foo-1.1 and python2-foo-1.2 even if we wanted to.

> 
> We don't support this for Java runtimes; there was a discussion a while back
> about this. If I am stuck on Java 1.7 for some reason-- for example, if I'm
> doing Android development, which at least last I checked (a month or two ago)
> *still* only supports Java 1.6 and 1.7-- I cannot get either through Fedora's
> official repos because we have 1.8 now (which is a good thing, it's definitely
> good that we ship the latest version of Java). In this particular instance, I
> can install Java 1.7 out of a copr and it works. But is that true for versions
> of other languages and stacks? 

This is more of a reflection of what the Java packaging community is willing
to support.  If someone wanted to support older Javas, they could.  And again,
this is just the major language version, not components.



-- 
Orion Poplawski
Technical Manager                     303-415-9701 x222
NWRA, Boulder/CoRA Office             FAX: 303-415-9702
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