On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 01:02:53 +0000, Michael A. Peters wrote: > Maybe "Fedora Extras" is the right place for these packages, but I > don't know, packages in "Extras" should link against current shared > libraries, and extras maintaining compat-* packages may result in some > maintainers using those instead of rebuilding/patching when needed. Maintainers can't used them for that. Because a compat-* package should not contain the headers files and libraries which are needed at build/link-time and not put these in a compat-*-devel package either. With compiler and standard library being an exception. Hence the current platform cannot be used to develop full-blown applications for the old platform and compile with and link with old libraries. But applications built on the old platform can be installed and run on the current platform, since the libraries needed at run-time are available in compat-* packages. There are other compat-* style packages in Extras already, when multiple versions/APIs of a library are needed at once by different applications in a repository. Those packages usually either apply the "foo$APIVERSION" or "foo$LIBMAJORVERSION" naming scheme, as in "foo2", "foo3", and so on. These are complete packages which come with their %name-devel counterparts.
