openmotif to be removed from Fedora October 2, 2006

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 10:56:38AM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> 
> The hard decision has been made that openmotif will be removed from
> Fedora and the current plan is to make this happen by October 2, 2006,
> the final development freeze for Fedora Core 6.

I disagree with that timeline. That's not very nice for Motif library 
users. Doing such a change without previous notice, with openmotif
and lesstif being available at the same time for only one month
and only in devel seems wrong to me. It is well known that lesstif
has has issues openmotif don't have, and that many users use the
motif library internally.

In my opinion it would have been much better to ship openmotif 
during FC6. The -devel packages conflict but the packages with libs
don't, so it would have been much easier for users to sort issues out.

Moreover it would also have been much friendly to leave an openmotif
rpm which is more split like lesstif is, as requested in 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203993
and is easier to install alongside.

> Maintainers need to update their packages to use another motif
> implementation, lesstif (in Extras). It is not 100% ABI-compatible (and

They are 0% ABI-compatible...

> provides a different shared library soname), but all that should be

For current release but not for all releases.

> required for most motif-dependent applications is changing
> 
> BuildRequires: openmotif-devel
> to
> BuildRequires: lesstif-devel
> 
> and rebuilding/recompiling.

One thing to be warned against is that some lesstif and openmotif versions
may provide the same soname although they are not binary compatible. I may
be wrong, but I think that this issue could break some upgrade. Indeed
imagine that there is an application in a previous fedora linked against
libXm.so.2 (which is the current soname of lesstif, while openmotif is at 
libXm.so.4). This may lead to 2 issues when fedora is updated:

1) if lesstif replace openmotif as it provides libXm.so.2, since it is
binary incompatible things will break. In that scenario the new fedora
packages will be fine, only the packages that are not updated by a version
built against lesstif will break. I don't see anything we can do to avoid
that.

2) Since lesstif don't obsolete openmotif, things may also break the
other way around, lesstif isn't installed since nothing requires it, and
the new fedora packages are installed and break since they have been built
against lesstif. To overcome this issue, it is possible to have packages
newly built against lesstif to have a

Requires: lesstif

The attempted lesstif install will conflict with the installed openmotif
but I think it is better that breaking apps without noticing.

This Requires is not an obligation, but if maintainers want to be on the 
safe side, I think that this redundant Requires (since rpm will add 
libXm.so.2 automatically) should be accepted. 

--
Pat