[packagers] The demise of the repotag

[Kjeldgaard Morten]

>
> If the new fftw3 is not compatible with fftw2 (soname change), then
> it shouldn't be possible to upgrade it because it'd break  
> dependencies.
> That is, rpm would say that there are broken dependencies, because
> package xxx requires libfftw.so.2.

Say I have installed fftw from RPMforge, which is version 2, and I  
have no packages that depend on fftw (or libfftw.so.2), then fftw  
will be upgraded whenever it becomes available in version 3. However,  
people may have locally compiled software which links to the shared  
library libfftw.so.2 and when that is suddenly not there, the  
application breaks.

> In Fedora, we provide compat-* packages in that case, because the rule
> is that package named fftw should be the latest release and any older
> non-conflicting releases should be packaged as compat-fftw, possibly
> with a number (compat-fftw2, for example).

And that rule is set in stone? I hope not, because it is *really*  
dumb, complicated and un-intuitive for users. Besides, noone else in  
the world besides Fedora uses it.

> Then, with both fftw-3.x and compat-fftw2-2.x in the repo, an  
> upgrade would
> go smoothly, I imagine.

Not if you have locally compiled software, that rpm knows nothing  
about, as described above.

> That's why we're working together to create ONE third-party repo.

That's going to be hard if your approach is a set of rules that can't  
be changed.

-- Morten