[Mageia-dev] About panotools patent problem (and other problematic rpms)

[Maarten Vanraes]

Op zaterdag 19 februari 2011 14:59:46 schreef Michael Scherer:
>  On Sat, 19 Feb 2011 09:20:50 +0100, Maarten Vanraes wrote:
> > Op vrijdag 18 februari 2011 14:42:02 schreef Michael Scherer:
> >> Le vendredi 18 février 2011 à 12:47 +0000, James Kerr a écrit :
> >> > If there are two packages, one in core and another in tainted,
> >> 
> >> then
> >> 
> >> > doesn't urpmi need a way to recognise that the tainted package is
> >> 
> >> newer
> >> 
> >> > than (an update to) the corresponding core package? I believe that
> >> 
> >> this
> >> 
> >> > is achieved in Mandriva, because plf is greater than mdv.
> >> 
> >> That's abusing release tag and it work by pure chance ( ie, had the
> >> plf
> >> decided to  be called the guillomovitch liberation front, it would
> >> not
> >> have worked ). And this is quite inflexible, since people will
> >> always
> >> have plf packages, leading to users adding some rpm in skip.list
> >> with a
> >> regexp.
> >> 
> >> This doesn't make much sense to treat tainted rpm as update to core,
> >> this is not the same notion. But we cannot express this in urpmi for
> >> the
> >> moment, as this would requires some way to say "if you need to
> >> install
> >> something, prefer this source rather than this one".
> >> 
> >> We can imagine a priority system, or we can simply say that if there
> >> is
> >> the same rpm on 2 media, we ask to the user ( except this would
> >> requires
> >> IMHO a better system than the current path based one to see what is
> >> in a
> >> rpm, but that's a rather long proposal to make ).
> >> 
> >> But you are right this another set of issues to solve for dual life
> >> packages.
> > 
> > after sleeping on this, i've had this idea:
> > 
> > why don't we rename packages in tainted?
> > keeping them in the same name, perhaps has issues with search
> > engines, (ie:
> > which version do you get?)
> 
>  with search engine ?
>  I can see the issue for support, yes, but search engine, no
> 
> > i proposed renaming packages in tainted,(but not the release tag).
> > 
> > would it be a good compromise if we named packages:
> > 
> > <orig_packagename>-tainted-<version>-<release> ?
> > 
> > the benefit of this could be adding an Obsoletes and Provides on the
> > original
> > package with the identical version.
> 
>  This could work, but I am not sure that a Obsoletes is required.
> 
>  One problem with this idea is that it will ask to user lots of
>  questions, and that's
>  something we should rather try to avoid ( any people who installed some
>  java rpm will
>  understand the issue ).
> 
>  But it has the advantage of not requiring anything special on BS while
>  providing the choice.

if there is obsoletes, i don't think a question will be asked...

> > for building, i may have this solution:
> > 
> > %tainted(%_optional_feature1 %optional_feature2 %optional_feature3)
> > 
> > this would allow the buildbot to look for %tainted  and if it does,
> > it could
> > rebuild it for tainted and add the particulars itself. this would
> > simplify the
> > whole plf/tainted thing easily. and since all 4 rpms are being built
> > at the
> > same time, you have no srpm problem either.
> 
>  A simple %define would do the trick, so that doesn't bring much.
>  And we can keep a list of package that should be compiled twice, that's
>  not the biggest problem to solve.


well, it's an idea, that allows us to have all the functionality we want, and 
no manual intervention needed anymore.