Summary of the 2008-04-08 Packaging Committee meeting

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le lundi 12 mai 2008 à 15:48 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway a écrit :
> 
>> * I'm not mandating that JPackage change anything. This is specifically
>> targeted on handling the Fedora packages which are derived from JPackage
>> packages.
> 
> That's not realistic, if you want your matching to work you need the
> tagging implemented both sides. The Fedora side is the easy one. Fedora
> has still not merged the bulk of the JPackage repository.
> 
Either I'm reading this page wrong:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DeepakBhole/ReasonsForKeepingJPP

or there's additional rationale for .jpp that's not on that page.

The only thing I'm seeing from that page is that people want to select 
the Fedora packages on their system that have a companion package in 
JPackage so that they can either remove the Fedora package in favor of 
the JPackage version or in order to see which packages originated in 
JPackage.  There's no reason that I see listed on that page for JPackage 
to rebuild with a new group/vendor.  In fact, if JPackage were to 
rebuild with the same group it would defeat the purpose of including 
that group.

I'm not saying that .jpp has to go, but I will say the .jpp-in-Fedora 
exception was explicitly given a limit when it was voted in that 
revolved around the selection issue being resolved in another manner.  I 
don't mind debating the merits of the new selection method, but changing 
the rules of what the requirements are once the old requirements are met 
does make me a bit upset.

Some of the base assumptions on the ReasonsForKeepingJPP also don't seem 
to be in line with past thinking about third party repositories.  We 
don't support people installing an rpm provided by an upstream on 
sourceforge if it's newer than the one in Fedora and back and forth.  We 
don't support people getting packages from Mandrake if they aren't 
available in Fedora.  We don't support people installing a python stack 
from pyvault to replace the one in Fedora.

We should either ship repodata for JPackage in the repo, officially 
support JPackage packages, and stop repackaging JPackage packages for 
Fedora or we should stop pretending that it's a goal of ours for people 
to be able to switch out the Java stack provided by Fedora with the Java 
stack provided by JPackage, interleave versions with whichever has the 
newer version, and etc.  (Note that this paragraph is not about 
packaging guidelines so it's not an option that the Packaging Committee 
can consider.  It's probably a FESCo discussion much as the repotag 
discussion was an EPEL Steering Committee discussion.)

-Toshio