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

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Am Sonntag, den 14.05.2006, 20:37 +0200 schrieb 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.

How about a policy like this:

---
Package updates in Fedora Extras to new upstream version are allowed for
stable Core versions as long as the soname of the provided libs doesn't
change. 

Updates with soname changes are okay if the packager takes care of one
of the following steps: 

a) you create and provide a compat-package with the old lib in it. The
compat-package of course needs to be parallel-installable with the new
version.

b) A slightly painful procedure:
- you prepare a update locally
- you test if all other Extras packages that were build against the new
version still build
- you announce the planed update to the lists and give 3rd party repos
some time (one week) to prepare; in parallel: 
- you ask all the maintainers of the packages depending on yours if it's
okay if either
-- you bump the release of their packages and request a rebuild
-- or if they want to do it on their own at the right moment (that's
crucial)
- when all the other maintainers agreed so the update probably is going
to be smooth you announce a specific date when you plan to rebuild you
package and those depending on it. This announcement needs to have a
list with all the packages that need a rebuild (to make sure that the
extras signers don't push the packages from needsign to the proper repo
while everything rebuilds) 
- you run a repoclosure after all the builds were done to make sure
everything has worked properly 

---
Options? Did I miss anything? 

> In this particular case my personal opinion (of no particular worth) is :
> 1. the change should have been announced loudly beforehand

+1

> 2. the breakage should have been initialy limited to FE devel,

+1

>  and only
> propagated to other versions after some sort of grace period

See "b)" above -- does that cover everything?

> 3. WTF is such a change doing in fc3 ?

Exactly.

[...]

CU
thl
-- 
Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info>