Policy proposal for compatibility packages

[Linus Walleij]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2008, Patrice Dumas wrote:

> Why not let the packagers decide for themselves?

It's just a policy, it's not Gods commandments. As a policy, we don't 
publish a plethora of compat-cruft. We (individual packagers) 
compromise any time we like as usual, and a maintainer with a soft spot 
for a certain compat-package can probably maintain it without problems.

I see it more like a guideline to the developer who is to make a 
decision: must I publish a compat-package or can I just discard the old 
API? Given some harsh words every here and there on breaking APIs you 
could easily get that impression. And then s/he knows that in Fedora, we 
love to discard old API:s.

So our community attracts people with this mindset and so forth.

Linus