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? It's only a deprecation warning for now and we have plenty of time to adjust.
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.
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.
I fail to see the benefit of deprecating this feature, except that it apparently simplified the implementation of a new feature upstream [1].
Reading that PR, it doesn't seem to be just one feature but an effort to modernize the whole codebase.
Regards Martin
[1] https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/pull/2730