rawhide report: 20080211 changes

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2008-02-15 at 13:31 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:15:40 +0100, Xavier Bachelot wrote:
> 
> > Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > > On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:44:52 +0300, Peter Lemenkov wrote:
> > > 
> > >> 2008/2/14, Xavier Bachelot:
> > >>>>       perl-XML-Xerces-2.7.0_0-4.fc9.i386 requires libxerces-c.so.27
> > >>>>       perl-XML-Xerces-2.7.0_0-4.fc9.x86_64 requires libxerces-c.so.27()(64bit)
> > >>>>       perl-XML-Xerces-2.7.0_0-4.fc9.ppc requires libxerces-c.so.27
> > >>>>       perl-XML-Xerces-2.7.0_0-4.fc9.ppc64 requires libxerces-c.so.27()(64bit)
> > >>
> > >>>  Is there a way to blacklist this package from the broken deps nag mail,
> > >>>  or am I doomed to get it daily until xerces 3.0 is released ?
> > >> One possible solution is to provide compat-xerces-c-2.7.0.
> > > 
> > > As the topic of "compat-" packages has come up elsewhere, too, recently,
> > > please think carefully whether to introduce either
> > > 
> > >   xerces-c27
> > > 
> > > or:
> > > 
> > >   compat-xerces-c
> > > 
> > > The compat- packages normally do not offer any -devel files you could use
> > > to (re)build other packages with. They are solely for binary compatibility
> > > with available packages, regardless of whether within Fedora or provided
> > > by a 3rd party. That's what the term "compatibility" means in this case.
> > > And we should not confuse the notion with multiple parallel installable
> > > versions of a library and its corresponding -devel packages. If you
> > > considered a compat-xerces-c-devel-2.7.0, that kind of defeats the purpose
> > > of compat- packages, and you could as well drop the "compat-" prefix from
> > > the package namespace and append the SONAME version to the base name, as
> > > in "xerces-c27" and "xerces-c27-devel".
> > > 
> > 
> > Are there any guidelines or howto for building compat package ?
> > I'm not sure a compat package is of much use here, but it'll still be 
> > something new to learn, so I'm willing to try.
> 
> Create a spec as if you package a library as usual.
> 
> Choose "compat-%{name}XY" as the basename for all packages, where XY
> is derived from the library version or the SONAME major version.
> 
> Delete or %exclude any files that would go into the -devel package.
I think, in this case you will also want to have a *-devel package,
because this issue is a source level/API issue.

These *-devel package doesn't necessarily have to be installable in
parallel to the "non-compat package" it only needs to be installable
alternatively.

Ralf