libopts

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Fri Dec 22 05:54:52 UTC 2006


On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 20:00 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> The libopts package has no owners.list entry. 
> It's files were cvs rm'ed a while back: 
> 
> revision 1.4
> date: 2006/11/02 21:21:57;  author: pfj;  state: dead;  lines: +0 -0
> 
> Removing package - now part of autogen
>         libopts/Makefile libopts/import.log libopts/FC-5/Makefile
>         libopts/FC-5/branch libopts/FC-5/libopts.spec
>         libopts/FC-5/sources libopts/FC-6/Makefile libopts/FC-6/branch
>         libopts/FC-6/libopts.spec libopts/FC-6/sources
>         libopts/devel/Makefile libopts/devel/libopts.spec
>         libopts/devel/sources
> 
> Of course since there is no bugzilla component and pfj doesn't seem to
> be around, it's hard to know what is going on... 
> 
> unless someone tells me otherwise I am going to place a dead.package
> file in libopts/FC-5/, libopts/FC-6, libopts/devel/ and mark it as
> Retired and request it's removal from the repos. 
> (I will do this tomorrow)
> 
> Did it really become a part of autogen on all those branches at the
> same time?
Well, it's a bit more complicated.

libopts has always been part of autogen. Its upstream sources are part
of autogen. However libopts also had been shipped as a separate
standalone library package.


IIRC, at some point in FE's history, pfj had submitted libopts and
libopts managed to make it into FE.

Later he submitted autogen, which pulled-in its own copy of libopts and
therefore had conflicted with libopts. 

He then decided to drop the standalone libopts, and to provide it from
inside of autogen. Also, neither autogen's upstream wanted to change
autogen to use a separate libopts, nor did pfj want to modify autogen to
using a standalone libopts instead of the bundled version.

=> At some point in history, we once had separate libopts packages, now
we only have autogen and no libopts-devel nor virtual packages inside of
autogen to "fake libopts packages" (!).

I can't find this situation to be satisfactory and actually think this
situation is messed up. But, AFAICT, nobody but autogen actually uses
libopts, so this isn't much of a problem.

>  Should a owners.list entry be made for it anyhow? 
Hmm, I am not sure about it. 

IMO, libopts actually is a separate package (With its own version
numbering), but in the way libopts currently is packaged, it only is an
internal autogen library not of much use to the public.

Ralf






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