[Fedora-packaging] Compat packages

[Denis Leroy]

Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On 03/19/2009 08:44 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> Is there any policy at all on compat packages?  I can't find anything
>> except this oblique reference to "openssl" vs "openssl096b":
>>
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/NamingGuidelines#Multiple_packages_with_the_same_base_name
>>
>> There are a number of compat-* packages in Fedora.
>>
>> We would like to add one for celt (an audio codec), since the
>> bitstream changes incompatibly in each release, and interoperability
>> depends on an application always using the same specific version.
>>
>> (This is in relation to this bug:
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=485245
>> and the celt package in both Rawhide and RHEL 5)
> 
> There is no formalized policy at this time. The last attempt by FESCo
> was tabled, but is here:
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BrianPepple/DraftCompatPackages
> 
> My opinion is that compat- packages are acceptable in cases where the
> primary (non-compat) maintainer agrees that there is value in the compat
> packages, and that it does not encourage upstreams to remain on old APIs
> unnecessarily.

My opinion also. On that topic, should we do something about compat 
packages not explicitly named as such. For example, we ship 
gtksourceview and gtksourceview2. Shouldn't they be called 
'compat-gtksourceview' and 'gtksourceview' respectively ? Where do we 
draw the line ?