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

[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.

> 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.

-- 
 Michael Scherer