What Seriously Ails Fedora

Joe Zeff joe at zeff.us
Thu May 28 23:43:42 UTC 2015


On 05/28/2015 04:30 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> Some things to consider:
>
>    A. If someone packages software into Fedora, are they obligated to
>       maintain all current and future software which might depend on it
>       in perpetuity?
>
>    B. If so, should that maintainer be allowed to veto the addition of new
>       dependencies?
>
> If you vote yes to both, get ready for it to be even harder to package
> software for Fedora.

I vote no to both.  A is clearly a straw-man argument.  If you are 
maintaining package Foo, which is a dependency of Bar, you have no 
obligation to support Bar.  You do, however, have an obligation to make 
an effort to support backward compatibility in Foo, so that Bar is 
forced to upgrade itself to accommodate changes to Foo.  Note, however, 
that listing a specific version of Foo as a a dependency rather than 
having *at least* that version makes all dependency issues caused by 
this a Bar issue, not a Foo issue.  And, of course, there's nothing 
forcing you to continue as maintainer if you wish or need to stop.

B, of course, is an absurd idea, and I doubt that this was an accident. 
  Whoever maintains Foo has the obligation to see to it that any and all 
packages that Foo depends on are listed properly, but has no say over 
what other packages require Foo.


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