On Tue, 2024-02-27 at 11:03 +0100, Ben Greiner wrote:
Am 27.02.24 um 10:32 schrieb Martin Wilck via openSUSE Factory:
On Tue, 2024-02-20 at 17:29 +0100, Dominique Leuenberger wrote:
So far we have come across one change that will impact a log of packages: RPM 4.20 will no longer support %patchN (e.g %patch0); RPM 4.19 has warned about this during the build already. I appreciate your efforts, but seeing the massive fallout this has,
Which fallout?
Extrapolating from the OBS requests I got for the few packages I am maintaining, there must be hundreds SRs floating around to apply this change to almost every spec, just for openSUSE.
> it looks very much like a thoughtless move of the upstream
maintainer.
You link one of the pull requests yourself. The maintainers gave this some thoughts and even anticipated repercussions. Not thoughtless at all.
The fact that they considered it makes it worse, not better, in my opinion. They deliberately decided to make their own lives easier and have everybody else deal with it. Yes, it's possible to "adjust" with simple scripting, and no, that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
This syntax has been supported for more than 25 years, and while it has always been kind of strange, it's easy to remember and widely used. By deprecating this syntax, they are causing hundreds of maintainers pointless work.
It's a simple automatic find and replace and has been done in the past few days for a couple thousand of packages already. There are far more API changes in various upstream packages which would warrant such a dramatic statement. This one does not.
Sorry if I sound dramatic. You are right, there's a pattern, and this one is not the worst example. I can't help myself, I find it annoying that people break backward compatibility light-heartedly like this, "because they can". I wish more upstream maintainers took API compatibility as seriously as Linus does. Martin