libutempter package will be replacing utempter soon

Mike A. Harris mharris at mharris.ca
Tue Jul 25 10:12:01 UTC 2006


libutempter, an alternative to Red Hat's 'utempter' which is a fork
based upon the original, will now be replacing the original.  Most
other distros have shipped the forked version for years as it is
cleaner well maintained code which has been very heavily audited, so
it makes sense for us to make the switch also.

The new package will be called 'libutempter' and contain a proper
-devel subpackage, so any Fedora Extras or other 3rd party repositories
which link to libutempter should update their BuildRequires to use
'libutempter-devel' instead now.  A backward compatible Provide will
be included in the package as well, but it may be disabled temporarily
to encourage people to update their packages, then re-enabled prior
to FC6.

Any packages which contain runtime dependencies on the 'utempter'
helper utility, should contain "Requires: utempter".  This will ensure
that it works both with the old utempter package, and also with the new
one, as we will be including a virtual provide for that.

I don't suspect there are many packages out there that this will
affect, but I'd appreciate a quick email from anyone who finds any, just
to keep tabs on what all uses it out there in the wild.

In Core, only xterm and libgnome seem to use utempter currently, and
I've notified the maintainers to give them a heads-up.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.




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