On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 10:56:38AM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote: > > The hard decision has been made that openmotif will be removed from > Fedora and the current plan is to make this happen by October 2, 2006, > the final development freeze for Fedora Core 6. I disagree with that timeline. That's not very nice for Motif library users. Doing such a change without previous notice, with openmotif and lesstif being available at the same time for only one month and only in devel seems wrong to me. It is well known that lesstif has has issues openmotif don't have, and that many users use the motif library internally. In my opinion it would have been much better to ship openmotif during FC6. The -devel packages conflict but the packages with libs don't, so it would have been much easier for users to sort issues out. Moreover it would also have been much friendly to leave an openmotif rpm which is more split like lesstif is, as requested in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203993 and is easier to install alongside. > Maintainers need to update their packages to use another motif > implementation, lesstif (in Extras). It is not 100% ABI-compatible (and They are 0% ABI-compatible... > provides a different shared library soname), but all that should be For current release but not for all releases. > required for most motif-dependent applications is changing > > BuildRequires: openmotif-devel > to > BuildRequires: lesstif-devel > > and rebuilding/recompiling. One thing to be warned against is that some lesstif and openmotif versions may provide the same soname although they are not binary compatible. I may be wrong, but I think that this issue could break some upgrade. Indeed imagine that there is an application in a previous fedora linked against libXm.so.2 (which is the current soname of lesstif, while openmotif is at libXm.so.4). This may lead to 2 issues when fedora is updated: 1) if lesstif replace openmotif as it provides libXm.so.2, since it is binary incompatible things will break. In that scenario the new fedora packages will be fine, only the packages that are not updated by a version built against lesstif will break. I don't see anything we can do to avoid that. 2) Since lesstif don't obsolete openmotif, things may also break the other way around, lesstif isn't installed since nothing requires it, and the new fedora packages are installed and break since they have been built against lesstif. To overcome this issue, it is possible to have packages newly built against lesstif to have a Requires: lesstif The attempted lesstif install will conflict with the installed openmotif but I think it is better that breaking apps without noticing. This Requires is not an obligation, but if maintainers want to be on the safe side, I think that this redundant Requires (since rpm will add libXm.so.2 automatically) should be accepted. -- Pat -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
