Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-packaging (49 mails)

[Michael Matz <matz@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Steffen Winterfeldt wrote:

> # ls -l lib*-[0-9]*.rpm | grep -v devel | grep -v debug | wc -l
> 5
> 
> vs.
> 
> # ls -l lib*.rpm | grep -v devel | grep -v debug | wc -l
> 382
> 
> Ah yes. Seems to be a rule that's really urgently needed.
> 
> While I agree that the mentioned scheme makes a lot of sense for, e.g, 
> libdb, I can't see any practical value in forcing it on existing 
> packages.

The problem is to foresee the future.  In absence of psychic abilities 
this rule is the only way to make it at least possible to deal with 
upcoming SONAME changes by installing multiple libbla packages.  We could 
of course enfore the rule only when such SONAME change comes up first 
from now on, that would still serve that purpose.  And that indeed was the 
initial goal: to apply the rule only if the package was changed anyway, at 
packager maintainers will.  

But of course you have to keep more things in mind if you want to postpone 
the naming scheme change: the package maintainer has to notice the soname 
change at all (don't laugh, sometimes even that can go by unnoticed); then 
he has to remember to also change the package name, not just the filelist.  
The earlier you enforce the new naming scheme, the more probable it 
becomes that nothing falls through the cracks.

So, I would support all attempts to follow that naming scheme even now, 
where it's perhaps somewhat questionable.

I think what triggered you was actually not the usage of the rule itself 
(the number suffix), but the necessary addition how to deal with package 
names which already have a numeric last character, which uglifies the 
package name quite a bit.  At least to my eyes libbz2-1 looks extremely 
ugly.  Ask yourself if you really had written a mail if you had seen the 
introduction of libz1 (instead of zlib).


Ciao,
Michael.
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