rawhide report: 20060720 changes

[Erwin Rol]

On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 15:59 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Jeu 20 juillet 2006 15:25, Erwin Rol a écrit :
> > On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 15:20 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> >> Believe me you're far better off with overlapping packages than a
> >> multiplication of "common" packages.
> >
> > What is the technical reason that overlapping packages are better than
> > common packages ? They still would be created from the same source rpm,
> > just like the gcc source rpm "creates" a number of rpms.
> 
> common subpackages wouldn't help your conflict a little bit as sanity
> would demand i386 and x86_64 require a common subpackage with the same
> nevr. So instead of yum barfing because i386 and x86_64 are not in sync
> you'd get yum barfing because i386 demands one common package and x86_64
> another.
> 
> rpm does not support producing subpackages with differing arches from the
> same srpm, you have to workaround this by launching several builds from
> the same srpm (plus spec ugly logic...) this is only done for very special
> packages in the buildsys
> 
> you'd get a lot of packages with one or two files in them and needlessly
> bloat the package number (which would bloat repodata, make more spec
> creation and translation manual work, bloat the dependency graph your rpm
> has to manage...)
> 
> and probably a vouple other reasons I forget.
> 
> All this for no win, since your problem is not the way we share files
> accross multiarch, but that at a given time i386 and x86_64 package sets
> are not consistent with each other.

OK that was a long but clear technical explanation, thanks.

- Erwin