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

[Brendan Jones]

On 05/23/2012 11:42 PM, Brendan Jones wrote:
> On 05/23/2012 04:44 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Unfortunately quite the opposite, there's a fair bit of resistance - the
> package has passed review and I've since unpushed an update while we
> work this out.
>
> By the same token I can understand where they're coming from - when (or
> if - I'm still not convinced) the bug reports come in they will have to
> deal with it in the first instance. The maintainer in rpmfusion has
> indicated he was looking to give it up, so I'll fire this scenario (with
> me maintaining in both repos back at them).
>
>>
>>> 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).
>>
>
OK, I think I have a solution. We'll stick to the name qtractor in 
Fedora, do the rename in RPMFusion but implement alternatives there.

To cater for existing RPMFusion users, I can be clear in the changelog / 
update notes that this Fedora package is replacing the one in qtractor 
and they should install qtractor-freeworld if MP3 support is desired. 
Sound OK?