libfoo<major> (was: Incoming: directfb soname problems)

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Dim 14 mai 2006 07:13, Michael A. Peters a écrit :
> On Sun, 2006-05-14 at 00:25 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
>
>>
>> Maybe it's time to think about packaging so into their separate
>> libfoo<major> subpackages like Debian/Mandrake/ATrpms are doing? This
>> always ensures forward and backward compatibility at the cost of dead
>> libfoo<major> packages lying around.
>
> I semi agree.

And I semi disagree.
libfoomajor is a great way to hide the problem under the carpet and
removes any incentive to app authors to resync on a common lib version.
All the FC packages that went through a libfoomajor period where a hell to
administrate and never seemed to disappear (ie other packagers felt since
they were there they didn't have to fix their packages)

In this particular case my personal opinion (of no particular worth) is :
1. the change should have been announced loudly beforehand
2. the breakage should have been initialy limited to FE devel, and only
propagated to other versions after some sort of grace period
3. WTF is such a change doing in fc3 ?
4. the way yum balks at the first repo problem is not always helpful

OTOH it may result in improved FE policies, so all is not black

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot