New Package: fish

[Axel Liljencrantz]

On 6/20/05, Ralf Ertzinger <fedora at camperquake.de> wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> Axel Liljencrantz <liljencrantz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > It is a bit of a kludge, I admit. But if someone has installed an
> > older fish package and upgrades to a fish version from the Fedora
> > repository, fish should not brake the login shell for the users, in my
> > opinion, so I'd prefer it if that update remained.
> 
> There has never been a package for fish in Redhat or Fedora that
> I am aware of, and even if there was, it would not have placed
> a binary in /usr/local. The same goes for all the big third party
> repos out there.
> 

No, fish has never been in Fedora RHEL, Redhat Linux or any related
distribution. I made the first release of fish just four months ago.
Other people have already made sure fish is in Debian unstable and in
Arch Linux, but I'm not as quick.

> In short, I do not think you should meddle with /etc/passwd.
> We can not care for clean upgrades for packages people have
> already installed that have come from god-knows-where.

The reason why I think it _might_ be the right thing to meddle with
/etc/passwd is that I have provided both src.rpm and i386.rpm files
for fish on the fish homepage since the very first release, and for
the first two months, these files installed to /usr/local, since I was
under the impression that external packages should go there. (I have
since been informed that /usr/local should only be used for unpackaged
commands.) According to my server logs, somewhere between 500 and 1000
people have downloaded a fish rpm that installs fish to /usr/local,
and many of those are probably running on fedora. I have no idea how
many of those people have since upgraded to a newer version with the
correct installation directory, nor do I know how many pre 1.6 users
there are who use fish as their login shell. But if fish enters the
extras repository without the above check, the next time any such
person runs 'yum update', they will be unable to log in. The number of
people effected by this is probably pretty close to zero.

Like I said, if the fedora policy is not to jump through hoops to
avoid getting hit by braindamage in external packages, I fully
understand that and will remove the offending lines. I just want the
decision to be made based on the facts of the situation.

--
Axel