On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 01:21 -1000, Warren Togami wrote: > 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. Well, I had assumed we were talking about few broken packages, but checking core (rpm -qlp *.rpm | grep '/lib/lib.*\.a$' reveals that things much more packages are shipping static libs than I had expected. Anyhow, given the fact static libs normally are only used if no shared version of a library is available, or if they are forced, I would expect only very few of them being used. > 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. I.e. Debian conventions ;) I perceive them as overly stylish, nevertheless they make sense. However, I were lucky if at least *-devel was systematically applied. > 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. Wasn't Fedora meant to be progressive? Instead, I perceive unwillingness and ultra-conservativism :( > 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. Similar considerations apply to selinux - No visible conventions on their tools' naming :( I think, we'll have to wait until a similar issue like the zlib disaster happens again (may be libnspr forcing are recompilation of half of FC) until people will be willing to change their attitude. Ralf PS.: Sorry for sounding bitter.
