Fedora Extras is extra

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Tue Nov 30 05:27:26 UTC 2004


On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 23:59 -0500, William M. Quarles wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 15:11 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> > 
> >>On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 06:44:10PM +0000, Michael A. Peters wrote:
> >>
> >>>Another thing - I hate beuracracy but this may be needed - a neutral  
> >>>naming authority. In cases where packages conflict simply because of  
> >>>different package name, if the naming can't be fixed between the repos  
> >>>themselves, let an independent community group decide.
> >>
> >>Fedora Extras _should be_ that independent community group.
> > 
> > 1. Fedora Extras is run and conducted by RH.
> > 
> > 2. It is RH, who until now has refused to cooperate with developers on
> > selecting N-V-R conventions. Until now, each of the 3rd parties (which
> > Fedora.US had been one of) has invented its own conventions.
> 
> Not really.  They actually are consulting with each other to try to keep 
> up compatibility.  But most of the maintainers of the packages in 
> question simply take their name and version number from the source, 
> which tends to minimize the "N-V" problems.
No disagreement on this part. This part is more or less obvious.

>   The R problems are another story altogether.
This and the epoch:-issue is the troublesome part of the story. Wrt.
this not even RH seems to have a convention shared between their
developers. 

> > 3. N-V-R's are only one kind package conflicts being involved in
> > incompatibilities which occur when mixing repositories. There are many
> > more, much worser hidden package dependencies "occasional users" will
> > rarely notice.
> 
> If tree falls in the forest but nobody is there to hear it, does it make 
> a sound?  My counterquestion would be, "Does it really matter?"
Yes, it does.

It won't matter in probably 90% of all cases, but the remaining 10% can
become ugly.

Most visible problem:
* Installation directories, e.g.
- Where and how to install *.desktop files into?
- Where and how to install plugins into?

* Optional features:
- Repositories provide packages having been compiled with different
features enabled.
- Repositories provide packages with different compilation/linking
options enabled (e.g. static/dynamic libs)

* Conflicting dependencies:
- Packages might be compiled against different versions of other libs,
resulting into incompatible behavior.
...

Now think about why installations of multi-media players (e.g. totem) is
troublesome and why so many people have problems in getting them
functional.

Ralf





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