[packagers] Re: incompatible fftw-3-1.1 kde-redhat packaging

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, Bent Terp wrote:

> On Friday 13 October 2006 18:38, Rex Dieter wrote:
> > Morten Kjeldgaard wrote:
> > > The problem is that your fftw is version 3.*, so you need to _rename_
> > > your package to fftw3.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > >In other distros, fftw is version 2.*, but there
> > > is no straight upgrade path from version 2 to version 3, so you can't
> > > just upgrade the fftw package without breaking all the programs that
> > > depend on it. Most distros I am aware of keep two versions fftw and
> > > fftw3, which are able to live side-by-side.
> 
> Both fedoraextras and atrpms do it the same way as Rex describes, rpmforge 
> does it the way Morten wants.

Not initially. Fedora Extras was the last one to adopt fftw (atrpms and 
freshrpms/rpmforge had it already). And you know what, Fedora Extras 
doesn't care about what already exists in other repositories. So from time 
to time they break stuff that was already there. fftw is not the first one.

So yes, Fedora Extras does it differently and Atrpms changed their ways 
and I guess we'll have to change now as well, especially for RHEL...


> Other distros - Suse, Mandriva, you name em - may have great merit in their 
> own, but little relevance to this discussion.

Oh, it had relevance. But Fedora Extras took the relevance away :) 
Everyone else usually looks at other distributions when introducing 
something new. And I think we took the convention from either Mandrake or 
SuSE.

 
> > Let me put it another way (bluntly): it's either the fftw(3) + fftw2 way
> > or the highway.  Which would you rather have?
> 
> My personal preference would be _one_ provider of fftw regardless of version - 
> or at least that all repos with fftw packages use the same numbering scheme. 
> But I realise that it is _not_ a trivial thing to achieve; maintaining 
> backwards compatibility without staying behind in the age of dinos. 
> Compromising usually leads to uniform discontent....

It's not about compromising. If we introduced it now, we would have 
followed Fedora Extras obviously. But that's not what happened.

And we cannot provide forward compatibility with what's not there. So it 
makes sense to do it the way most people did because that most likely what 
others will do as well. In theory that is...

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]