[Fedora-packaging] PHP packaging policy notes

[Christopher Stone]

On 7/6/06, Toshio Kuratomi <toshio at tiki-lounge.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 15:11 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
> > On 7/6/06, Toshio Kuratomi <toshio at tiki-lounge.com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 13:42 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
> > > The message that this all stems from is here:
> > > https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-packaging/2006-July/msg00050.html
> > > the quotation by you is that you are requiring php >= 4.2.0 in some
> > > packages; php >= 4.3.0 in others.  php 4.3.3 was already present in
> > > Fedora Core 1 so the package version is deeply irrelevant for Fedora.
> > ...
> > > The rule is whether the lowest version requirement is satisfied by the
> > > packages on Fedora's target distributions.  It may be open to
> > > interpretation whether "target distribution release" means non-EOL
> > > distributions (in which case FC4+ currently) or distributions the
> > > packager is actively building for but in either case, php >= 4.2.0 being
> > > irrelevant even for FC1 means it is too old.
> >
> > I have no problem with just Requiring php instead of php 4.2 because
> > 4.2 is ancient.  Note that even my default spec file:
> > http://tkmame.retrogames.com/fedora-extras/spectemplate-pear.spec
> > Does not have any version number listed for php.  But I do not see any
> > harm in actually providing this information, it would seem especially
> > important for packages that require php 5 or even php 6 when it comes
> > out.
> >
> This is a different ball of wax in the beginning but becomes the same
> later on.  Let's say FC6 is the first FC to provide php-6.0.1 and your
> package requires php-6.0.0.  Then you can list Requires: php >= 6.0.0 in
> your spec file.
>
> Now, a year and a half goes by and FC6 goes EOL.  Now the supported
> platforms are FC7, FC8, and devel.  All of these platforms have php >=
> 6.0.0.  So the version information is no longer needed.  I don't know if
> you'll get a bug report asking to remove the versioning (probably no one
> will notice for quite a while) but new packages should not specify the
> Requires: php >= 6.0.0 at that point.

I agree 100%.  The guidelines should state something like, if it
requires a php version < 18 months old, then the version should be
specified. Or something like this.

> ...
> His posts also show how intradistro dependencies have to account for
> patches and bugfixes that make a package not-quite the next version.  If
> you're using virtual Provides that represent the upstream package
> everywhere, how are you going to account for this?

Yes, there may be a case where you have to patch a pear package, and
some other pear package must depend on this patch being in place.  In
a case like this I would think you would use:

Requires: php-pear-Foo >= x.x-y

Instead of the usual:

Requires: php-pear(Foo) >= x.x