Core Packages in Violation of the Fedora Naming Guidelines

Fernando Nasser fnasser at redhat.com
Wed Jul 12 19:18:06 UTC 2006


Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 July 2006 10:08, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>   
>> Probably depends on how often the packages are forked and rebased, and the
>> amount of changes you do above the original packaging
>>
>> It'd be great to have a common naming convention when stacked packaging
>> happens though
>>     
>
> Why though?  What real problem does it actually solve?
>
>   

Several reasons. 

First, as these packages are maintained upstream (not only the software, 
but the spec files and other SRPM bits) it is important to know in which 
EVR they are based on.  So, if you know that ......6jpp has a fix for 
some problem then if the one you have installed is .....6jpp<some fedora 
suffix) also has it.  That is what Nicholas was talking about.

Second, these packages are supposed to interoperate with other 
repositories (remember that only a fraction of Java packages is AOT 
built on Fedora), so preserving the upstream EVR string is fundamental 
for that to work.  This ensure no packages are unduly overwritten when 
the two repositories are enabled and that the latest version/releases 
prevail.

All Java releases for RHEL have been done this way, by adding _NNrh to 
whatever the upstream JPackage EVR was with success.
For Fedora 3 and Fedora package a _NNfc was adopted.  Gary Benson used 
to have a document describing it, which I thought lived in Fedora pages 
somewhere.

There are hundreds of Java packages there, all rebuilt from upstream 
JPackage.org, shipped on Fedora for a couple of years with this EVR 
convention.

W.r.t. the suffix added after the upstream EVR it does not really 
matter.  It can be anything people here want it to be.  We are updating 
the packages so we can use a new suffix as we get them from upstream JPP 
1.7 if it is agreed upon quickly (time is running out). 

Should we change from the _NNfc convention?
If so, now is my turn to ask: Why?


P.S.: Several upstream (from JPackage perspective, i.e. upstream**2 from 
Fedora's point of view) are releasing software with a CVS tag used for 
release.  They do use that as a reference for questions, but reports 
etc., so it is important information.  As they are CVS tags, they have 
'_'s (underscores) on it. 

P.S.2: All non-final releases of JPackage RPMs start with a '0.' prefix, 
so they are updated by a final release when (if) it becomes available. 




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