BZ followups for mingw32-jasper and mingw32-openssl in epel 5

[Erik van Pienbroek]

Hi Jason,

The mingw packages in epel5 aren't really maintained. Back in 2008 they
were initially pushed (bootstrapped) to epel5 by Richard W.M. Jones and
afterwards Levente Farkas did some maintenance work on it. Afaik there
were no other people interested in maintaining mingw in epel5 at that
time.

With RHEL6 Red Hat decided to provide and maintain various mingw
packages in their additional upstream repositories so various mingw
packages weren't allowed in epel6 any more. Some community-supported
mingw packages did end up in epel6 (by accident) but caused noise
because of missing ppc64 support on Red Hat's end. A public call was
done in 2011 to find out if there were volunteers around to fix the
epel6 issues but no one replied:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/mingw/2011-October/004182.html
If I remember correctly these packages were pulled from epel6 to avoid
the noise.

In the Fedora MinGW world a lot changed in 2012. We decided to switch
from the old mingw.org toolchain to the much better maintained mingw-w64
toolchain. This also gave as the possibility for both Windows x86 and
x64 support (while the old mingw.org toolchain only provided x86
support). Due to this we had to introduce a new set of packaging
guidelines and all mingw packages had to be ported.

The mingw packages in epel5 are based on the old mingw.org toolchain and
the old Fedora MinGW packaging guidelines. Therefore we can't just merge
back fixes from Fedora to epel5.

With epel7 we are in a different situation now. As Red Hat doesn't
provide mingw support any more in RHEL7 we were able to introduce the
Fedora mingw packages to epel7 without any issues. Backporting fixes is
now also easier as the packaging guidelines are the same and we don't
plan on doing any major core toolchain changes any time soon.

We have to make a decision about what to do with the mingw packages in
epel5. They are horrible outdated by now and have security issues. I'm
tempted to have all mingw packages removed from epel5, but this could
break users which still use them (although I hardly believe there are
any epel5 mingw users left).

How do the other Fedora mingw folks on this list think about this
situation

Regards,

Erik

Jason Taylor schreef op vr 01-08-2014 om 17:49 [+0000]:
> Hi All,
> 
> I was reviewing a couple BZs[0][1] and was wondering how these should be
> handled? It looks like packages are only currently being pushed to
> fedora repos and epel 7. TIA..
> 
> Regards,
> 
> JT
> 
> 
> [0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=765663
> 
> [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=815672
> 
> 
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