[fedora-java] orphaning of packages

[spikefedora at gmail.com]

Hi,

On 12/09/2011 08:19 PM, David Walluck wrote:
> On 12/09/2011 02:00 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote:
>> Seems to be a few notable ones.
> 
> What spike said is basically true. However, the APIs are not backwards
> compatible, so simply adding a Provides to the httpclient packages isn't
> enough to fix those packages. The package maintainers would have to
> check/modify the code of their packages.

After having a look a the APIs, I have to admit that removing
commons-httpclient is probably not an option. They are not only not
backwards compatible, but in fact quite different. Replacing httpclient
with httpcomponent would require massive restructuring of code.

That's probably the basic dilemma of java packaging: Upstream projects
don't want to change because deprecated libraries still work fine and
are either bundled anyway or being pulled my maven etc.
So we have to keep and maintain a deprecated package
(commons-httpclient) to keep another deprecated package (maven2, xmlrpc)
and so on.

Regards, Chris