Package naming conflicts (was: Re: sound problems)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2009 14:32:40 +0200, Axel wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 11:24:07AM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Axel Thimm wrote:
> > > Incompatible to what? If there are conflicts between ATrpms' packages
> > > and others from the N thousand official packages, please report
> > > them and we'll fix them.
> > 
> > One concrete source of incompatibility is that you use Debian-style
> > versioning (e.g. libquicktime0) for some library packages, which is against
> > Fedora guidelines (in fact, IIRC a guideline change you proposed to that
> > effect was rejected) and which can confuse yum in some cases.
> 
> I think it was rather forgotten and withdrawn, but that's rejected
> nonetheless.
> 
> The reson I use these conventions is because they actually increase
> compatibility: When repo X, repo Y and repo Z (one of them may be
> Fedora, the others two 3rd party ones) have built foo, baz and wuz
> against libbar.so.1, libbar.so.2 and libbar.so.3 these runtime
> packages make sure that they can all coexist w/o one repo enforcing a
> full rebuild on the other.

Without proper Obsoletes/Provides in both directions (i.e. Fedora <-> 3rd
party repo), it doesn't work flawlessly. libbar3-3.0.1 will conflict
with libbar-3.0.2. AFAIK, this has happened several times before.
Additionally, you need to take precautions and relocate files in
several packages for them to become parallel-installable.

> This will even help Fedora, as the reason Debian/Mandriva introduced
> them was for being able to cope with tons of packages when a
> dependency does an sobump.

Without a doubt. If done properly, it would fix the poor broken deps
caused by sudden/unexpected soname bumps.

> Currently in Fedora whenever a package with many dependent other
> packages changes soname, we need to go yelling around to other
> packagers and are only able to do an upgrade of this kind in rawhide.

This is also due to koji buildroot protection and overrides.
Some packagers believe they must push a soname bump to stable before
they can rebuild dependencies. They feel embarrassed when they learn
that they can request releng to set an override-tag and then prepare
a group update for bodhi. Features and procedures are not known enough
and are hard to find in the Wiki.