Comments on bug 140214 - the removal of X utilities?

[William Hooper]

Bryan Ischo said:
>
>>
>> Bryan Ischo said:
>> [snip]
>>
>>> That the extra effort that Mike A. Harris went
>>> through...
>> [snip]
>>
>>
>> Please look at the spec file.  Adding a handful of "rm -f" commands
>> isn't a lot of extra effort to remove unwanted (and potentially
>> unmaintained) binaries.
>
> My point was simply that it was more work than leaving them in would have
>  been.  This is in response to your previous assertion that one of the
> reasons for doing this work was to avoid the work of maintaining these
> programs.  You have yet to demonstrate that maintaining these programs
> has taken any work whatsoever, and any work at all to add the rm -rf
> commands is still MORE work than the zero work of not doing it.

All programs need maintained.  Looking at the spec file there were at
least a couple patches that could be dropped since these programs were no
longer included.

Every patch needs work to verify it applies correctly to any new upstream
code.  Removing the files is a change that won't need maintenance until
the code to build them is removed upstream.

> So what you're suggesting be done is to create a secondary SRPM, which is
>  virtually identical to the original one, building all the programs in
> the same way that the original one does, including all of the 52 MB of
> source code associated with the X.org release, *except* that the set of
> programs that it actually installs is simply the "opposite" of those
> installed by the original RPM - whereas the original installs everything
> except these couple of utility programs, this new RPM would install
> nothing except these couple of utility programs.

If, after looking at the code, that is what it takes.  Has anyone looked
at the code?

> And this RPM would then probably become completely outdated once the
> X.org
> team reorganizes their software according to what they suggest will happen
>  with X11R7.

Yep.

> You still think this makes sense?

Yep.  It makes sense for the VNC SRPM, and that is what is done.

>> You are assuming that the packages will be included after they are
>> removed from the X.org source upstream.  This doesn't appear to be a
>> valid assumption.   To quote Mike "There are no plans of adding these
>> removed applications back to the Fedora Core however."
>
> That's fine.  If at the time that X.org reorganized their source tree,
> and/or the sources for these programs are removed, then it would make sense
> for someone to take ownership of that source as a separate project and
> maintain their own RPMs for them.

These discussions are in public mailing lists now.

> And it would be perfectly reasonable to
> discuss with the X.org people their plans to remove these programs from
> their software base and how users who still might want them can take over
> ownership of them.

If someone wanted them included that bad they can go upstream and maintain
them.  Then, when the RFE is filed against FC, they can say "I'm actively
maintaining it upstream".

> What does not make sense to me is for Fedora to decide ahead of time,
> *before X11R7 is released*, to do their own arbitrary removal of these
> programs, in a way that forces anyone who still wants to use them with
> Fedora to use the onerous mechanisms that I just described.

It doesn't matter if it is now or later, they are going to be gone.  The
FC xorg-x11 maintainers didn't want to go through maintaining them in the
interim, so they were removed.  Can you complain enough and get them back?
 Maybe, but I think the effort would be better spent getting them into
Extras.  Maybe the experience gained can even help the upstream project
pull them out into their own projects.

> So it's only a 52 MB download potentially.

Only if you need the SRPM.  If you are using binary packages now, why
would you need the SRPM after packages are added to Extras?  Going back to
the VNC example, no one complains about the 41 MB SRPM, because 99% of the
users are using the 1.1 MB binary RPM.

--
William Hooper