RFC: Soname in rpm name

[Sean Middleditch]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 06:45 -0600, Rex Dieter wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> > Le lundi 24 janvier 2005 à 13:23 +0100, Aurelien Bompard a écrit :
> >>
> >> Well, I think that adding the soname to the rpm name could help with that:
> ...
> > Well if it can be easily solved how come we still have this problem ?
> > There are several packages that use the soname approach in FC and they
> > are the ones that are a PITA to cleanup now and then
> 
> Agreed.  Avoid the extra hassle of multiply installed libfoo.so's unless 
> absolutely necessary.  Otherwise, it's added complexity and bloat for 
> relatively little gain.

It's the entire reason why _have_ library sonames...

We _have_ had this problem, btw.  The problem is that it's not generally
developers that notice it.  It's the user that just want to have their
machine work.  I go to install third party app Foo from Foo's web site,
it needs libbar.so.2, Fedora only has libbar.so.1, and many other apps
on the net require libbar.so.1.

You can't just upgrade apps to use libbar.so.2 because it's a *different
library*, it might require massive code changes in order to use - if it
were something compatible there wouldn't be a problem at all.

Both libraries can be installed at once (again, the whole bloody reason
we _have_ sonames), but because the packaging creates an artificial
incompatibility that only exists because the package is, put plainly,
braindead and broken, the user can't install Foo.

Now you, as a developer or experienced Linux admin, can easily solve
this.  Maybe you install the library from source.  Maybe you rpm -i the
new library package.  Both are things that the average person - even if
they _are_ an experienced Linux user - shouldn't have the waste time
doing.  Every hour of your life that you spend working around broken,
lazy, braindead library packaging is an hour you could have spent with
your family, friends, doing something you enjoy, working on some new
Free Software, etc.

The system is designed so that multiple libraries that are incompatible
can be installed at the same time.  Let's not have the packaging system
continue to break that because of something so incredibly trite and
meaningless as the aesthetics of the rpm -qa output when you have the
two versions installed.

> 
> -- Rex
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