Make announcing soname bumps mandatory (was Re: rawhide report: 20081018 changes)

[Alex Lancaster]

>>>>> "JS" == Jeff Spaleta  writes:

JS> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:

>> -jef"Geos moving to 3.0 at this late date is a problem for me. Not
>> cool. This should have come in MUCH earlier in devel cycle"spaleta

Yes, indeed bumping to 3.0 so late is not a good idea, nevertheless it
shouldn't be forbidden.  What should be forbidden is not announcing it
beforehand.  This is why I specifically reminded Balint to, at the
very least, announce it here on fedora-devel-list as per policy:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Packaging_Tricks#When_breaking_Application_binary_interface

I think that the above policy should be made mandatory rather than
"nice to" (unless you happen to be building all affected package
yourself in which case an e-mail is superfluous).  At the very least
it would get maintainers in the habit of running repoquery more
regularly and so they would get a better sense of what other packages
depended on their package (many maintainers seem unaware of this).
Ideally this would be automated and provided in regular reports, or
somehow incorporated into PackageDB.

Unfortunately this bumping the sonames without notifying the list
and/or without co-ordinating with other package maintainers keeps
cropping up and the evolution maintainers are particularly guilty of
this.  I don't think that the rebuild of evolution/e-d-s was announced
here either and it has caused more breakage in rawhide 20081022:

Broken deps for i386
----------------------------------------------------------
	evolution-brutus-1.2.27-1.fc10.i386 requires libcamel-1.2.so.13
	evolution-zimbra-0.1.1-2.fc10.i386 requires libcamel-provider-1.2.so.13
	evolution-zimbra-0.1.1-2.fc10.i386 requires libcamel-1.2.so.13
	planner-eds-0.14.3-5.fc10.i386 requires libcamel-provider-1.2.so.13
	planner-eds-0.14.3-5.fc10.i386 requires libcamel-1.2.so.13


JS> So yeah... not the packagers fault.... clearly upstream "fixed"
JS> their code to report version 3.0 instead of 2.3..well after the
JS> 3.0 release.

I just wanted to fix the broken deps with the most minimal packaging
fix, because without it building it wouldn't even be installable.

JS> Alex if you have the time, please hunt down and patch the runtime
JS> version query that is keeping this from importing.  I'm not gonna
JS> be able to get to this till the weekend it seems.

Looks like Kevin beat me to it...

Alex