Confusion with openal-soft

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On 08/16/2009 11:52 AM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:30:31 +0900, Mamoru wrote:
> 
>> Michael Schwendt wrote, at 08/16/2009 11:47 PM +9:00:
>>> On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:39:37 +0900, Mamoru wrote:
>>>
>>>> Michael Schwendt wrote, at 08/16/2009 09:29 PM +9:00:
>>>>> On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:04:14 +0200, LinuxDonald wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I have updated the packages for F-10 and F-11 with conflicts and without 
>>>>>> obseltues :)
>>>>> Explicit Conflicts need the approval of the Fedora Packaging Committee.
>>>>>
>>>> This occurs only on F-10/11 and not on rawhide.
>>>> Please see the discussion on bug 515109 for details.
>>>
>>> First it is pointed out that parallel installable packages would be
>>> preferred, then there is a jump to making them conflict. Why?
>>>  
>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Conflicts
>>
>> To be clear, openal and openal-soft can be installable in parallel
>> (because of the same library with the different soversion),
>> however openal-devel and openal-soft-devel is actually in conflict.
> 
> Why?  In openal-soft-devel I see a pkgconfig file. Surely that one
> can be modified to point to relocated headers and libopenal.so
> 
This would make sense to me.  Do consumers of openal not make use of the
pkgconfig files?  If not, do they use configure scripts that make it
easy to do this?

> My interest in this is because I'd like to know where we are with
> regard to the rather complex Fedora Packaging:Conflicts policies?
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Conflicts#Header_Name_Conflicts
> [...] Put the headers in a subdirectory of /usr/include. [...]
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Conflicts#Compat_Package_Conflicts
> [...] Whenever possible, this should be avoided. [...]
> 
> So, two times it is recommended to let the packages coexist. "openal-soft"
> is not a compatibility package. The old "openal" at most could be
> described as a compat package in disguise after introducing openal-soft.
> 
<nod>  I can see the argument that "openal" is a compat package.  Here's
the Complete Guidelines that reference that:

"""
Compat Package Conflicts
It is acceptable to use Conflicts: in some cases involving compat
packages. These are the cases where it is not feasible to patch
applications to look in alternate locations for the -compat files, so
the foo-devel and foo-compat-devel packages need to Conflict:. Whenever
possible, this should be avoided.
"""

So the vagueness here is the feasibility of updating packages to look in
the alternate locations for the compat files.  As mschwendt is pointing
out, the pkgconfig file indicates this should be relatively easy.  Is
there some other information about this that we should know?

We also usually introduce compat packages during rawhide/development.
This lets us work out any kinks and get as many packages ported to the
new interface as possible.  Pushing this kind of change to a stable
release needs to be thought out and discussed on this list.

> We don't need more SHOULD type of guidelines like that, if it's too easy
> to choose the lazy packaging or if explicit Conflicts are the 1st choice.
> 

I agree with this.

-Toshio

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