[Fedora-packaging] Re: supporting closed source operating systems?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 10:25:51AM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> So are we talking subpackage or wholly new package for the mingw  
> packages?  These policies assume wholly new packages.  I think that  
> wholly new packages might be easier to manage in this respect.

Four packages are mingw-specific.  They are:

  mingw-runtime    Runtime libs
  mingw-binutils   Binutils tools
  mingw-gcc        GCC cross-compiler
  mingw-w32api     Win32 API header files

However these alone are not really useful, because if you want to
compile anything which isn't just a bare C program, you'll be needing
dependent libraries too.

How libraries are packaged is an open issue.

Libraries are compiled from the latest source.  Usually it's just a
matter of doing %configure --host=i686-pc-mingw32 but of course
because these libraries aren't routinely compiled for MinGW by
upstream, I expect there will be a lot more bugs/regressions which the
maintainer will need to handle.

Taking GnuTLS purely as an example ...

Dan Berrange wanted libraries to be built as a subpackage of existing
libraries.  Thus we'd have a subpackage of the current Fedora gnutls
package.  I have shown how this would work here:

  https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-July/msg00435.html
  http://hg.et.redhat.com/misc/fedora-mingw--devel/?cmd=manifest;manifest=91a808c59de63589367c7bd9750da1fca342c529;path=/gnutls-fragment/

The advantage is that we stay in step with upstream GnuTLS, including
things like bug/security fixes.  Also we're building from a single
SRPM which is possibly more efficient.

The disadvantages include the fact that the library maintainer may not
be interested in maintaining the mingw subpackage, it's the first
thing that'll be turned off when problems arise, no Fedora review, ..

We can also do libraries as independent packages.  For example, for
GnuTLS I did this independent package:

  http://hg.et.redhat.com/misc/fedora-mingw--devel/?f=2b4ca8a081d8;file=gnutls/mingw-gnutls.spec

My opinion would be to allow _both_ approaches, depending on what the
existing Fedora maintainer of a library was happy doing.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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