unnecessary font Provides churn (was Re: rawhide report: 20090116 changes)

Ville Skyttä ville.skytta at iki.fi
Sun Jan 18 21:35:12 UTC 2009


On Saturday 17 January 2009, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le vendredi 16 janvier 2009 à 19:25 -0700, Alex Lancaster a écrit :
> > I just fixed the 'Requires:' that were causing broken deps a few days
> > ago to match the new 'Provides:', but it appears that the naming for
> > the provides has changed *yet again*.
> >
> > Why wasn't the change done in one hit to avoid all these extra
> > rebuilds?
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Shipping_fonts_in_Fedora_(FAQ)#fpc_renaming

I think it's about time the people responsible for this mess start actually 
fixing the compatibility issues and make-work they have been and still seem 
to be continuously inflicting themselves.

And while at it, how about dropping the arrogance - I have no idea what good 
what do you think you're accomplishing with statements like the following, to 
name a few?

"we feel it is quite possible and desirable to do a clean break and not carry 
on indefinitely old provides in the repository metadata": a 
guideline "justification" after already breaking things several times, both 
before and during the current guideline process.

"it's the usual core fonts brokeness which has existed for as long as we used 
core fonts": when something that has _used to work for ages_ (temporarily?) 
broke due to X server changes.  I suppose this has nothing to do with the 
fonts packaging changes but it does tell something about the poster's level 
of interest towards backwards compatibility in this area.

"it's less critical": essential parts of a sentence used to shrug off three 
unnecessary backwards incompatible changes in dejavu-lgc packaging during the 
past year or so.

"We do try to avoid renammings, but sometimes they happen. Fontconfig apps 
don't care :)":  Right.  It seems that neither do you, and you haven't tried 
very hard at all.  Where did you post the patches that add fontconfig support 
to the packages you think it's ok to keep breaking?




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