[Fedora-packaging] PHP packaging policy notes

[Christopher Stone]

On 7/5/06, Enrico Scholz <enrico.scholz at informatik.tu-chemnitz.de> wrote:
> chris.stone at gmail.com ("Christopher Stone") writes:
>
> >> It is stupid and in most times redundant to add blindly a versioned
> >> dependency just because a README tells that a certain version is
> >> required.
> >
> > pear packages adhere to very strict standards and versioning
> > requirements is part of that.  All pear packages are very specific
> > about versioning requirements.
>
> Again: rpm does not allow to require a certain program (PHP) version;
> you can require a certain package version only.
>
> And btw; packaging guidelines are handling this case already:
>
>   | First, if the lowest possible requirement is so old that nobody has a
>   | version older than that installed on any target distribution release,
>   | there's no need to include the version in the dependency at all.
>   | ...
>   | As a rule of thumb, if the version is not required, don't add it just
>   | for fun.
>     [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines]
>
>
> > Please do not ask me to lower the quality standards that pear packages
> > expect by not providing this information in my spec files.
>
> You are not lowering quality standards when unneeded and non-working
> things like "Requires: php >= 4.2" will be omitted.

Unneeded? by whom? Fedora's rpm? other package maintainers for other
distributions?  Some poor sap who built his OS from scratch who is
trying to determine what he needs installed for your package?  Somone
who only wants to upgrade your package and not their whole system?

Oh I forgot, version dependencies dont work on Fedora (LOL).

We are not adding this information because it's fun, and we are not
adding requirements for packages that are so old nobody will have them
installed.

Can we please close this silly discussion or does anyone here actually
agree with Enrico?