[Fedora-packaging] Java guideline inconsistency

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Sat May 9 17:11:15 UTC 2009


Peter Lemenkov wrote:
> 2009/5/9 Jussi Lehtola <jussi.lehtola at iki.fi>:
> 
>> Quite on the contrary. I think prefixes are quite useful, since many
>> language specific packages might have otherwise conflicting names
> 
> Not a names, but a *filenames*. This should be fixed as well - I don't
> think that there is a reason to maintain correspondence between %name
> field and the resulting rpm's filenames (or even to maintain
> human-readable rpm filenames), at least in main repositories.
> 
There isn't a correspondence.  Or rather, the correspondence you see is
entirely cosmetic.  the rpm _filenames_ are entirely for the convenience
of the humans who have to deal with them.  The rpm Name attribute is
what rpm, yum, and the package manager depend on.  And conflicts between
the rpm Name attribute are very bad.

If we had two different packages with Name: argparse and one was a
library for java and one was for python we could rename the filenames so
that they can both exist in the repositories.  But the moment you go to
install them you have a conflicting rpm name and have problems:

* Which of the two packages will be installed when you run yum install
argparse?

* How do you install both packages at the same time?

* How do you prevent one package from upgrading the other package since
the name is the same in the rpm database?

and so on and so forth.

-Toshio

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