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

Sat Feb 19 14:59:46 CET 2011

 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
+
+