comps discussion at fudcon and the future

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Thursday, 15 January 2009 at 16:47, Florian Festi wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I fully agree that this current package handling situation is less then
> perfect. We have all been overrun by the amazing success and growth of
> Fedora. A lot of mechanisms that have been put into place years ago do no
> longer fit - the comps file being one.
[...]
> Handling of language dependent content:
> This is related to the "conditionals" mentioned above. With the increasing
> number of languages supported and packages being properly translated we ship
> more and more language dependent content the users are not interested in. We
> are currently missing both a way to package these contents properly and a
> mechanism the control which should be actually installed.

And the ability to add the previously uninstalled language-dependent files
to already installed packages.

> Multilib:
> The situation has changed a lot since we introduced multilib. The challenge
> who is going to support 64bit processors first has been decided long ago and
> the age of 32bit processors is ending. There are several annoying features
> of the solution that was chosen at the time (overwriting 32 bit binaries,
> install lots of files twice) and we should get rid of them at some point in
> the (not too near) future. But this may require some other changes first...

Or we could just drop multilib. ;)

[...]
> Doing things per packages gets too expensive:
> Even a small amount of work or possibility of error gets expensive and
> annoying if it has to be done in a lot of packages. The example we are
> looking at right now are scripts that are handling special types of files
> like: ldconfig, install-info, gtk-update-icon-cache, ... We hope to come up
> with a solution soon.

Just don't break plain rpm -i installs and rpm -e removals while you're at it.
I.e. don't go the SUSE way and require some frontend for pre/post-transaction
actions.

[...]
> I believe this list (including the issues brought up in the original post)
> will require deep changes to the way we package Fedora during the next few
> releases. Changes to the comps file should better fit into our overall plan.
> 
> 
> 
> Nevertheless I'd like to comment the suggested solution:
> 
> Some kind of conditionals will need to stay. As soon as we have a better
> solution we can easily drop them but I cannot see yet when this is going to
> happen. The solution will surely be part of yum and might even require
> changes to rpm (No soft requires discussion now and here!).

+1.

Regards,
R.

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