What Seriously Ails Fedora

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 04:43:42PM -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
> >   A. If someone packages software into Fedora, are they obligated to
> >      maintain all current and future software which might depend on it
> >      in perpetuity?
> 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,


An effort, sure. But an obligation? That's the same as A, especially
when the library changes so that Bar doesn't work but the new version
is required for other stuff.


> 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,


And this is often practically the case.

> 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.

Listed? Where? And again, why obligated?


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader