On disttags

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed May 19 17:35:38 UTC 2004


On Wed, 19 May 2004 12:23:31 -0500, Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu> wrote:
> Speaking of useless large package updates, why does redhat bundle
> koffice-i18n, k3b-i18n (these are just 2 examples) into the main koffice
> and k3b rpms, so that any updates to koffice and k3b will also "force
> users to eat useless large updates"?

I hear there is this wonderful thing that rpm has called obsoleting.....
so that if a specific package is decided to be split or combined later
on down the road, it can be handled gracefully.

what you are suggesting is a mandatory rebuild of  any packages as a
matter of overreaching naming policy....for the entire collection of
packages. In a world full of shades of gray, the contrast setting in
this argument is set pretty high.

And you still have not addressed the issue of how to handle backported
fixes. So far in this example you are talking about replace foo-1.3
with foo-1.4 or foo-1.5. The actually problem is how to roll
backported fixes. Applying targetted fixes to foo-1.3 does not make it
foo-1.4 or foo-1.5. foo-1.4 and foo-1.5 upstream could very well
include change in functionality beyond the needed fixes. It is not
always appropriate to bump a package up to the next version. You can
either accept that backport fixes will be needed and the naming policy
will need to be flexible enough to handle that, or you can't accept
it. Until you accept the need for that situation, I'm not sure any
further discussion on the list about this is worth having.

-jef





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