On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 23:59 -0500, William M. Quarles wrote: > Ralf Corsepius wrote: > > > On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 15:11 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote: > > > >>On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 06:44:10PM +0000, Michael A. Peters wrote: > >> > >>>Another thing - I hate beuracracy but this may be needed - a neutral > >>>naming authority. In cases where packages conflict simply because of > >>>different package name, if the naming can't be fixed between the repos > >>>themselves, let an independent community group decide. > >> > >>Fedora Extras _should be_ that independent community group. > > > > 1. Fedora Extras is run and conducted by RH. > > > > 2. It is RH, who until now has refused to cooperate with developers on > > selecting N-V-R conventions. Until now, each of the 3rd parties (which > > Fedora.US had been one of) has invented its own conventions. > > Not really. They actually are consulting with each other to try to keep > up compatibility. But most of the maintainers of the packages in > question simply take their name and version number from the source, > which tends to minimize the "N-V" problems. No disagreement on this part. This part is more or less obvious. > The R problems are another story altogether. This and the epoch:-issue is the troublesome part of the story. Wrt. this not even RH seems to have a convention shared between their developers. > > 3. N-V-R's are only one kind package conflicts being involved in > > incompatibilities which occur when mixing repositories. There are many > > more, much worser hidden package dependencies "occasional users" will > > rarely notice. > > If tree falls in the forest but nobody is there to hear it, does it make > a sound? My counterquestion would be, "Does it really matter?" Yes, it does. It won't matter in probably 90% of all cases, but the remaining 10% can become ugly. Most visible problem: * Installation directories, e.g. - Where and how to install *.desktop files into? - Where and how to install plugins into? * Optional features: - Repositories provide packages having been compiled with different features enabled. - Repositories provide packages with different compilation/linking options enabled (e.g. static/dynamic libs) * Conflicting dependencies: - Packages might be compiled against different versions of other libs, resulting into incompatible behavior. ... Now think about why installations of multi-media players (e.g. totem) is troublesome and why so many people have problems in getting them functional. Ralf
