Self-depracating packages was moin/mediawiki/etc [Need buildsys and rpm/yum eyes on this please]

Patrice Dumas pertusus at free.fr
Tue Feb 2 10:06:41 UTC 2010


On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 07:22:35PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> 
> For this one, note that Fedora moves fast enough that it isn't the same kind
> of issue as for EPEL.
> 
> We do break compatibility on the release boundary and users do have to
> perform manual upgrades there.  After 13 months, Fedora 11 is no longer
> supported and we don't have to worry about security issues or bugfixes to
> moin-1.5 anymore.  

Nevertheless those issues happen in fedora. This is especially true for 
development related packages. There are a lot of automake/autoconf versions
in parallel in fedora. Also sometime it is very handy to have parallel
versions of libraries with incompatible API but still used previous API
(for example I maintained libnet and libnet10). Also at some time gfortran
was buggy (though it was already the main compiler) but it was nice to have 
a package (cernlib) compiled with g77 or gfortran such that users may choose
the one they prefer. The possibility to push preview packages in fedora
is also something interesting, and there is also the issues of transitions
(like the python3 issue).

In the end tackling the issue of installing packages in parallel in a global
and comprehensive way instead of ditching the issue because it smells like 
long time support in fedora would be, in my opinion, beneficial -- especially
because this is not an easy isue. However, my opinion is also that there
is too much 'political' pressure against working on this subject in fedora,
so EPEL may be a better place to discuss and set up policies that could
then be reused in fedora when opposition anything that could be useful for
long time support becomes less strong.

--
Pat




More information about the epel-devel-list mailing list