[Fedora-packaging] Overlapping/variant rpms - how to ensure correct resolution

Tom 'spot' Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Wed Feb 23 20:28:37 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 15:22 -0500, Scott Lawrence wrote:

>Fedora Core inludes w3c-libwww.rpm, but that version does not include
>compilation with openssl.  For lots of good reasons, we need the
>openssl, so we build a version of the w3c-libwww.rpm that has it
>enabled; that's the only difference.

In this case, this is a bug in Fedora Core's w3c-libwww package. I can't
think of a good reason for it not to depend on openssl, since it should
be present on the vast majority of installs (and isn't an unreasonable
dependency when installing w3c-libwww).

>In any event, this seems to me to raise a general issue of how to cope
>with the fact that some packages can be built in (potentially
>overlapping) variants.  How can we make all of the variants available
>and express what each provides so that tools like yum can make the
>correct choice?

One of the hard and fast rules I intend to implement is that Fedora
Extras packages cannot duplicate existing packages in Fedora Core.

Please open a bug against bugzilla.redhat.com to get w3c-libwww to start
building with ssl enabled, and by FC4, this issue should be moot. :)

Otherwise we either start hacking conflict overrides, or we end up with
rpms that have renamed libraries, effectively doubling the number of
libraries on a system.

The Red Hat package maintainers are willing to fix issues in their Core
packages, and Fedora moves fast enough that it should never be a problem
for more than 6 months. (And if the maintainers aren't willing, me and
Greg can start beating them over the head with the cluestick)
>
~spot
---
Tom "spot" Callaway: Red Hat Sales Engineer || GPG Fingerprint: 93054260
Fedora Extras Steering Committee Member (RPM Standards and Practices)
Aurora Linux Project Leader: http://auroralinux.org
Lemurs, llamas, and sparcs, oh my!




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