Compat Libraries (was Re: libcurl.so.2)

[Michael A. Peters]

Cross posted (from fedora users to fedora-devel ... maybe we need a  
fedora-philosophy list ? ;)

On 12/07/2004 12:34:23 PM, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> Paul Howarth wrote:
>> http://www.city-fan.org/ftp/contrib/sysutils/Mirroring/compat-libcurl-7.11.2-2.i386.rpm
> 
> I'd kind of expect this RPM to be part of FC3 distro, but it wasn't.

I agree.
I've had to package a couple compat libraries myself (libgal2 and  
libgtkhtml3) as software I needed refused to compile against the fc3  
(gnome 2.8) versions, but did fine against the fc2 (gnome 2.6)  
versions.

I'm not sure they should be installed by default on a fc3 system -  
compat-libstdc++ does because fc3 ships with software that wants it (I  
think OO.o) - but what would be *nice* is if a fedora-compat repository  
were somewhat maintained that included binary compat shared libraries  
for cases such as these, where a third party package wants an older  
version of a shared library.

They could be autofetched by yum, install side by side with the fc3  
versions, and make use of shared libraries a little friendlier to third  
party commercial packagers who don't update their binary software as  
often as fedora core gets updated.

Maybe "Fedora Extras" is the right place for these packages, but I  
don't know, packages in "Extras" should link against current shared  
libraries, and extras maintaining compat-* packages may result in some  
maintainers using those instead of rebuilding/patching when needed.

But a Fedora repository for compat packages would be sweet - even if it  
only kept compat packages for one or two previous versions of fedora.

If possible, the compat packages should be built in fc3 systems and  
link against current fc3 libraries themselves when they can (ie build  
the compat packages on fc3)