Ralf Corsepius wrote:
We are talking about "changing packaging conventions" to reduce to
possibilities of potential bugs. If you guys are unwilling to change
anything on your packages, we can stop this discussion now.
We cannot change *everything* that has existed for years to suddenly
follow a new ideal perfect conventions. If we did so, then we would
have enforced that all library packages begin with "lib", and many other
package changes that don't really benefit us. There is a significant
maintenance and engineering burden for not only us, but 3rd party
software providers when anything is changed.
Generally "old" stuff are grandfathered in for this reason.
Any ideal perfect convention of today might easily become different in
the future, meaning more changes that may needlessly upset people and
complicate engineering.
We cannot change *everything*, but it is OK to change some things.
Where to draw the line is the key question with no simple answers.
Another example: I warned on fedora-devel-list a while ago that the
influx of java packages with arbitrary names are polluting the namespace
with names that are not obvious that they have anything to do with java.
It has been suggested that java packages providing libraries should be
named java-* and only applications can avoid this rule, similar to
perl-* modules and perl software like spamassassin. This however upset
our java people because it would be significant maintenance burden to
fork from upstream jpackage, who had used these names in some cases for
*years* prior to our importing.
Warren Togami
wtogami@xxxxxxxxxx
