RFC: Soname in rpm name

Axel Thimm Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
Mon Jan 24 21:55:58 UTC 2005


On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 10:22:13PM +0200, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 20:06 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 11:34:03AM +0100, Aurelien Bompard wrote:
> >
> > > http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RpmHowToAdvanced#Library_policy
> > > http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html
> > > 
> > > How about a similar policy for Fedora ? Is it the best solution to this
> > > problem ?
> > 
> > I think this is an area, where other distributions have found nice
> > solutions and Fedora/Red Hat should simply use one of the existing
> > policies (instead of creating one from scratch).
> 
> I sort of agree, but shipping such packages should be done only if
> absolutely necessary in FC/FE.  Carrying backwards compatibility baggage
> is not something that aligns well with the project's objectives IMO.

But on the contrary it is not directed compatibility, but rather a
unilateral, you have a scheme for both forward and backward
compatibility packages, so that third parties (as well as Red Hat as a
vendor itslef) can easily move forward to the next bleeding edge
softwrae release.

> See eg. points 5 and 7 in Objectives (and maybe 3 in Non-Objectives) at
> http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html

In the sense of the above I would even see them as promoting
arguments.

Currently if Red Hat ships libfoo.so.2 and you want to have
libfoo.so.3, so need to go through a couple of hops, replace core
packages with compatibility libs (or even worse, not care about
dependencies on libfoo.so.2) and finally called a heretic. Been there,
seen that ...

If this idiom already existed, one would simply package the new
library into libfoo3 and no clashes/replacements with libfoo2 would
occur.

(But note: the above is slightly simplified, there are a coupdl of
controlable issues that must be taken care of).

> Of course, there are other distributions with other kinds of focuses
> than the Fedora one where doing this soname-in-name thing might actually
> be a good general rule of thumb rather than an ugly exception.

If we are talking on naming schemes we cannot only consider Fedora, as
its bigger brother RHEL will share the same. But I believe that the
soname-in-rpmname based approach is both suitable for a stable ABI
like RHEL as well as a fast pacing one like Fedora's. At the very end
it only adds flexibility at the cost of required garbage collection
that can easily be solved.

And note that the frame objectives of the two distributions already
deploying this scheme are indeed very close to RHEL (infinite release
cycles of Debian ;) and Fedora (Mandrake's latest and greatest).
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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