Package name changes

Ville Skyttä ville.skytta at iki.fi
Mon Jul 11 16:30:38 UTC 2005


On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 11:15 -0500, Quentin Spencer wrote:

> When I imported the GiNaC package to extras, I kept the capitalization 
> in the name (which I admit is odd) so it would match upstream. So, 
> there's now a new release in which the upstream developer has apparently 
> modified the name of the package so that it's all lower case. I probably 
> should have done this to begin with (the Debian package did),

Yep, one easy way to avoid these problems when upstreams change their
minds is to always stick with lowercase ;)

>  but 
> suppose I wanted to now make a switch to a more sane all-lower-case 
> name--how would I go about it? (I haven't yet decided to do this--I just 
> want to figure out what's involved). I've never used the "Obsoletes" in 
> a spec file before, but I suppose that would be needed here?

Obsoletes: GiNaC <= 1.3.1
Provides:  GiNaC = %{version}-%{release}

>  More 
> importantly, would I need to create a new package in CVS that obsoletes 
> the old one, or just put a renamed spec file in the old CVS tree?

Probably the former, but people who actually know will need to confirm.

> Lastly, is all of this worth it for a fairly trivial name change? (Note 
> that packages requiring ginac aren't a big problem--there's only one).

Dunno, you're the maintainer, you decide.  When using the Provides: as
specified above, even that one package would need no changes right now.

Alternatively, if you're anticipating a switch later, keeping the
current one as GiNaC and adding "Provides: ginac =
%{version}-%{release}" could be worth considering too (which, BTW,
wouldn't be a bad idea IMHO for all packages that don't have
all-lowercase names, and that's something even rpm(build) could
theoretically do under the hood).




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