What Seriously Ails Fedora

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Thu, 28 May 2015 23:31:11 -0700
Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:

> On 05/28/2015 08:15 PM, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> >
> > How?  boost-terminal isn't in the hypothetical current release, so
> > there's nothing to check.
> 
> How?  maintain some sort of backward compatibility so that you don't 
> need to check package-by-package to find out what you're breaking.

Sorry for late post here, but I was out yesterday and wanted to add a
bit of information here that folks might find interesting. 

When some package is renamed or is part of a stack of things and
retired, we already handle this pretty well with Obsoletes and
Provides in rpm. For example, the xfce4-terminal package used to be
called "Terminal" (how's that for generic). Upstream renamed it and in
Fedora we pushed the new package name with Obsoletes/Provides so
everyone with "Terminal" got the new package. 

In the f22 cycle, there were some Xfce panel plugins that used the
libxfcegui4 interface. That was depreciated by upstream in Xfce 4.8
days (early 2011). We finally retired the ones that hadn't be ported to
the new interface along with the libxfcegui4 package, but we also added
Obsoletes to the new libxfce4ui package. So, people doing upgrades
would have those packages removed in favor of the new interface. 

Of course where this breaks down is when something is isolated and not
part of any stack, and where the package is being retired because the
maintainer isn't active anymore. Long ago there were some proposals
around this to create a package that simply Obsoletes these no longer
maintained packages, so they go away on upgrade. However, that means
that someone could have packages that work (even though they aren't
maintained) and use, and suddenly they are removed from their machine
and they have no way to get them back. ;( 

kevin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20150530/52c42032/attachment.sig>