proposal to remove static libs from -devel packages for FC5

[Warren Togami]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> We are talking about "changing packaging conventions" to reduce to
> possibilities of potential bugs. If you guys are unwilling to change
> anything on your packages, we can stop this discussion now.
> 

We cannot change *everything* that has existed for years to suddenly 
follow a new ideal perfect conventions.  If we did so, then we would 
have enforced that all library packages begin with "lib", and many other 
package changes that don't really benefit us.  There is a significant 
maintenance and engineering burden for not only us, but 3rd party 
software providers when anything is changed.

Generally "old" stuff are grandfathered in for this reason.

Any ideal perfect convention of today might easily become different in 
the future, meaning more changes that may needlessly upset people and 
complicate engineering.

We cannot change *everything*, but it is OK to change some things. 
Where to draw the line is the key question with no simple answers.

Another example: I warned on fedora-devel-list a while ago that the 
influx of java packages with arbitrary names are polluting the namespace 
with names that are not obvious that they have anything to do with java. 
  It has been suggested that java packages providing libraries should be 
named java-* and only applications can avoid this rule, similar to 
perl-* modules and perl software like spamassassin.  This however upset 
our java people because it would be significant maintenance burden to 
fork from upstream jpackage, who had used these names in some cases for 
*years* prior to our importing.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com