[Fedora-packaging] How to package a patched older version of libvmime in Fedora best?

[Lubomir Rintel]

On Thu, 2009-04-02 at 14:13 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On 04/02/2009 02:11 PM, Robert Scheck wrote:
> > As written above, it is already more or less a fork, but the guys don't see
> > any real need to rename or much interest to maintain API, soname etc. For
> > them it just works with their own more or less forking-patches currently.
> 
> This is great until there is a security issue or a bug fix that doesn't
> make into this copy.

Well, not much of an issue if it has a caring and responsive maintainer.
The Security Response team tracks also embedded and old copies and
notifies their maintainers. There's no chance of fixing the security
issue with "dumb luck" of bumping the package to newer release but I
suspect that's nothing we want to rely on anyways.

> The "toss random patches against old versions of libraries and carry
> them forever" is a plan for disaster. We shouldn't be encouraging it.

I can imagine that sticking to earlier release can be quite logical
reaction when upstream keeps changing the API incompatibly. I don't know
anything about this specific case though.

(Oh,by the way, I remember porting balsa to newer version of some gnome
mime library a couple of weeks ago. If this is the same library; they
provide a shell script that tries to do most of the changes
automatically. I discovered it when I was done with my patch... I could
still verify. Anyways, if this is it, it might help you)

-- 
"Excuse all the blood" -- Dead