Re: Policy on supporting old and external software packages and compat RPMS

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On Tue, Dec 06, 2022 at 03:44:37PM +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:
On 06/12/2022 10:40, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
On Tuesday, 06 December 2022 at 07:43, Terry Barnaby wrote:
[...]
My view is that compat versions of the commonly used shared libraries
for programs that are used on Redhat7 should be kept available until
most people are not producing programs for that system at least
+nyears and then I guess Redhat8 once that really becomes a core base
platform that external people use. A core list of these (there are
only a few) could be kept somewhere and when one is to be depreciated,
or users see problems when Fedora is updated,  a decision on this can
be then made with that info. This would keep the Fedora system
relevant for more users needs without too much work.
Well, that is still *some* work and someone would have to do it. Are you
volunteering?

In the case of ncurses, it is really just putting back into the SPEC
file that which was removed for F37 plus the extra storage on mirrors
for the compat RPM's.
If it's "just" that, why don't you do it yourself? Obviously, the
current ncurses maintainer decided it was time to drop the old v5 ABI
compat libs from the package. However, nothing is stopping you from
picking that up and maintaining an "ncurses5" package for as long as you
need it.

Regards,
Dominik

Well in this case I have created a suitable compat lib, all I did was re-introduce the bits to the SPEC file that removed the building of the compat lib and we are fine. I haven't separated it out from the main ncurses SPEC through and have only done this locally as I have no knowledge of the hoops to create a separate package and that seems like the wrong way to do this in general. I have made this available to others who will be in the same boat.

But the purpose of my thread here is a more general Fedora policy question as it affects users of Fedora as to what applications the OS is likely to support. If the policy is to just support Fedora built binaries within the particular version of Fedora and to ignore external and commercial binaries built with say Redhat7 and provide no degree of compatibility so be it, but it would be useful for everyone to know where the land lies and be on the same page. The maintainer of the ncurses package wasn't sure of the policy on this. In my case, a lack of being able to easily run particular external/commercial programs built for Redhat7 will likely move me further away from working with Fedora (using, reporting bugs, promoting it etc.) as it will be a less useful system for our usage.

I'm not in charge of policy, but I always assumed it was based on technical possibilities (within reason) and people wanting to invest time in it.

Open source is for me all based on fixing your own issues and doing it in such a way that it others can benefit from it too. If you have a use case for something and are willing to spend the time to keep it alive while not limiting others, Fedora can support it.
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