Re: Nvidia packaging in Fedora (Summary)

["Mike A. Harris" <mharris www linux org uk>]

Rex Dieter wrote:
> > - I still say the libGL devel stuff and libGLU should be split from
> > xorg-x11-devel.
>
>
> You keep saying that.  But, why?  There is no other/alternative GL 
> implementation in Core or Extras (Nvidia's doesn't/shouldn't count in 
> this discussion).
>
> On the other hand, I thought one of Mike's original motivations for 
> splitting off Mesa-GL was to allow for drop-in replacements.  I'm not 
> sure if there is value anymore in packaging these separately.

The purpose of splitting out libGL and libGLU was indeed to allow 3rd 
party rpm packages to install alternative implementations of libGL 
and/or libGLU at the request of a partner.  It was a very reasonable 
request, and so it got implemented a number of OS releases back.

It is entirely preferred, to have -devel packages for the libraries 
shipped in the OS, and to that effect, having -devel packages for libGL 
and libGLU is no different.  When this was implemented however, -devel 
packages did not get created, however that was not an intentional 
decision really.  It "just happened that way" essentially, and nobody 
ever reported any problems, or pointed out the fact that the development 
bits weren't also split out, so it stayed that way over time.

Eventually someone did point out the problem, but also pointed out it 
wasn't a big deal because it was only a problem if you were using 
unsupported 3rd party drivers, and it was pretty easy to work around the 
issue.

At the time this was discovered in that particular OS development cycle, 
it was beyond the freeze date to which additional packages or 
subpackages could be added to the OS, and since it was a low impact 
issue, which only affected incorrectly installed unsupported 3rd party 
drivers, it was definitely not a priority to break our freeze for.

I don't remember which OS release that was exactly, but there have only 
been maybe 3 people in 2 years ever even notice the problem and point it 
out, so it isn't a major flaw in the OS really, but rather just a minor 
inconvenience for some systems with unsupported software installed.  The 
issue basically fell between the cracks after that, due to the low 
number of people reporting the issue and it's relative low priority.

Having given the background now, I do believe the correct solution is to 
have separate -devel packages for those libs, for consistency if nothing 
else, and we will indeed do this in a future OS release.

Fixing the issue will have some build dependancy problems in the OS and 
with some 3rd party rpm packages that do not specify virtual requires 
for the libGL and libGLU virtual provides, so fixing this in an erratum, 
will not be considered an option.  The time to fix this, is in a 
development cycle, in which we're updating to a major new release of the 
X window system (so we can easily share one src.rpm between multiple 
OS's without major ugly hacks to the spec file for one OS release).

When we jump to X11R7, that will be the right time, and there will be 
quite a few xorg packaging changes, which make the impact of the change 
much smaller also, and so that's when we'll make the change.

Hope this helps.