On Fri, 2019-10-18 at 16:25 -0400, Robbie Harwood wrote: > Christopher Engelhard <ce@xxxxxxx> writes: > > > On 18.10.19 17:21, Robbie Harwood wrote: > > > > > While you're right that the solutions from source distros (i.e., NixOS > > > and Gentoo) would be very hard to adapt, binary distros have also solved > > > this problem in different ways. I'm most familiar with Debian's > > > solution (virtual packages[2], provides:, and alternatives [1]) which > > > to my mind maps much more clearly onto Fedora's setup. Obviously we > > > can't use their code wholesale without migrating to APT, but as you say, > > > the goal is to derive inspiration. > > > > > > 1: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives > > > 2: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-virtual > > > > I'm not a Fedora packager (yet[1]), so correct me if I'm > > misunderstanding things completely, but is there any reason not to > > adapt the existing RPM provides: functionality for this? > > I'm not aware of technical reasons not to do this - as Neal elaborated > on, this is already possible. I don't think there is one. But it's not a perfect solution either. I mean, we're talking about *stacks* here, remember. FreeIPA isn't one package - you can't just have 'freeipa4' and 'freeipa5' both providing 'freeipa' and call it a day. There's a whole ton of stuff that goes in there. 'freeipa5' might need different version of ten different other components compared to 'freeipa4'. So, you're no longer looking at one pair of packages with the same 'provides', you're looking at a dozen, and someone needs to be keeping track of which ones go together and what they're all for in the first place. But with this approach you're not building any infrastructure for *doing* that. These things are clearly a conceptual lump, but you're not really providing a way to express or work with that. Modularity is intended to do that - to provide a framework and some technical backing for treating alternate groups of packages that provide different implementations of the same thing *as* groups, essentially. I mean, it's not like the Modularity team wasn't aware of these other approaches, I'm pretty sure they were discussed. It might be reasonable to go back and check the various docs and blog posts and things the modularity team put out before just suggesting 'hey what about this other thing', especially where 'this other thing' is something you could reasonably imagine at least one of them would probably have heard or thought of... -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
