Wine/Cedega and fedora 3

[Sean Middleditch]

On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 12:48 -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 12:39:22PM -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > that have absolutely no negative impact on how Linux works now for any
> > users while potentially improving things for other users.  Better
> > packaging isn't going to hurt anyone, but it will help.  I haven't yet
> 
> Im still a little confused the precise points you want to see improve. Can you
> enumerate them as concise points ?

The biggest thing Red Hat could do is simply provide a little cleaner
packaging.  There are libraries that Red Hat packages which are clearly
capable of being parallel installed and otherwise working beautifully,
but Red Hat's packages cause artificial incompatibilities.

Take the libcurl examples from the other thread.  The curl package has
both the libcurl library and the curl utility.  When curl was upgrade,
it dropped libcurl.so.2 and added libcurl.so.3.  There is only one
package that, depending on version, provides two totally different
interfaces.  You can't even manually install both versions since both
include the curl utiltiy and thus have true conflicts.  I had a third
part open source app (Xine) that depended on libcurl.so.2.  Apps from
Fedora requires libcurl.so.3.  It took around a month for a new Xine
compiled against libcurl.so.3 to appear.  I had to uninstall and not use
Xine for a month.

However, there was no reason why this should have happened.  Both
libcurl and Xine were correctly functioning and well written in terms of
library interfaces.  The entire problem with artificially created by the
RPM packages.

If libcurl had been split from the curl package and given proper names
like libcurl02 and libcurl03, this problem never would have occured.
The upgrade would have installed libcurl03, any utilities/apps that
needed libcurl.so.3 would be satisfied, and apps that still needed
libcurl.so.2 wouldn't have any problems as the packages would be stick
in this exclusive "one or the other" problem.

It's just little stuff like that I want to see fixed.  That's it, on Red
Hat's part.

In general, I'd like to see more responsibility on the part of certain
library developers.  Mike Hearn and Havoc Pennington have written some
pieces on all the details of library management, I don't think I can
really say it any better than they did.  ~_^

> 
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.