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

[Maarten Vanraes]

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?)

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.

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.

WDYT?