Attn: Maintainers of things which might depend on xorg-x11-xkbdata

[Mike A. Harris]

The xorg-x11-xkbdata package originally contained X.Org's
xkbdata, but we switched to using xkeyboard-config late
in the FC5 development cycle.  It was too late to rename
the package at that point, so we left it as-is.

The package contains "Provides: xkbdata" for the purpose
of allowing packages which require xkbdata to use the
virtual provides and not have a dependency on the package
name.  That allows the actual data to easily move from
package to package in the future, thus futureproofing
things - or so the theory goes.  Of course that relies
on everyone actually using the virtual provides. ;o)

Anyhow, now that FC6 development is underway, we are
renaming the package now.  The virtual provides will
remain as is, so any packages requiring "xkbdata" should
continue to work properly.  If however any packages
hard code the old package name, they will need to be
updated to use the virtual provides instead.

Note that similar strategy is used throughout all of the
X.Org modular packaging, and packagers should always use
a virtual dependency on modular X items if one exists
already (ie: xdm, xfs, Xorg, Xnest, Xvfb, individual
binaries present in various apps/utils packages, etc.).
This helps to futureproof everything as much as possible,
and while in a perfect world the packaging of things
shouldn't really change much, nobody's planned on it
changing and it has changed 4-5 times over the last
2-3 years, so using virtual provides/requires for this
stuff now, helps to save everyone headaches in the
future.

I just thought I'd give a quick heads up now in the
unlikely event that something breaks due to incorrectly
specified dependencies.  ;)

Thanks in advance.
TTYL



-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.