RFC: Soname in rpm name

[Aurelien Bompard]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> If i understand the argument that people are making... is that doing
> it this way... is a burden on 3rd party packagers who have to try to
> predict when and if Core is going to introduce a libname[Version] for
> previous versions.

I also find it much easier for new contributors to Extra to have a clear
policy about this. Since more and more people are going to be contributing
to Fedora, I think that we have to agree on policies.


> Another argument which has been made for continuing in this fashion is
> that  standardizing on using sonames in all library packages
> potentially lowers the bar to backward-compatibility cruft. Such
> libraries would linger in an unknown maintainership state and be
> difficult to drop at any point because there will always be users who
> are using legacy application that needs that legacy library.

Very true, and that's what Axel's proposal to introduce a virtual Provides
is trying to solve. With it, a simple "rpm --whatprovides
shared-library-package" returns all the library packages.

Now we need a way to actually expire the old libraries. Proposals have been
made in this direction to flag what the user has directly asked for and
what was brought in as a dependency. In which case the library could be
garbage-collected (if nothing depends on it anymore).
This would be great, but I don't know how much work it would require to
implement it in rpmlib (and in wrappers maybe ? maybe not needed)

Another solution would be to select those of which nothing depend and to ask
the user if it has to be removed. This would be much easier to implement of
course.

Does this sum it up correctly ?

I think that both solutions are not mutually exclusive. We could start the
slow move to add virtual provides in the shared libs, and sonames in the
rpm name, and write the second script. We would have something useable
before rpmlib gets the "garbage-collect" feature.

Did I miss some points ?

Thanks

Aurélien
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