[Fedora-packaging] Moving an existing rpmfusion package into Fedora

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 23 May 2012 14:59:34 +0200, BJ (Brendan) wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I've been getting some conflicting advice as to what to do about moving 
> a patent unencumbered version of package that has existed in RPMFusion 
> for some time.
> 
> The package is qtractor (a digital audio workstation/ sequencer), 
> software we'd like to showcase as part of Fedora 18's Audio Spin.
> Removing libmad (MP3) library deps was simple enough via a compile time 
> flag and a Review request was raised [1]. Using 
> audacity/audacity-freeworld as a precedent it was suggested that we 
> rename qtractor in RPMfusion to qtractor-freeworld and have it Conflict: 
> with Fedora's qtractor.

That's the way to go, IMO, provided that RPM Fusion don't disagree
and start a we've-been-first-to-package-qtractor game. I would hope that
they would be happy to rename to -freeworld.

> The problem here is that RPMFusion users may have their libmad version 
> silently replaced by the one in Fedora during the transition.

True. There would be a window of N weeks during which qtractor-freeworld
could "Obsoletes: qtractor < 0.5.3-3", and afterwards, Fedora's qtractor
would be published.

> One solution here is to leave qtractor as it is in RPMfusion and rename 
> the one in Fedora to something else (qtractor-free?) and perhaps use 
> alternatives to permit coexistence, removing the need for conflicts
> 
> Is this reasonable?

Not so good wrt the package naming guidelines. Also, a "yum install qtractor"
with plain Fedora would still not work. Sure, one can "yum search qtractor",
but it would be odd to not use the upstream name as other dists do it
(independent of whether a 3rd party has packaged it first).

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