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

Sun Feb 20 19:48:04 CET 2011

Michael Scherer skrev 18.2.2011 15:42:
+> 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.
+>
+
+It is an abuse yes,
+but the great thing about it is we _know_ it works...
+so no surprises...
+
+(if it aint broken...)
+
+> 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 ).
+>
+
+Well, the old simple logic works...
+
+lets say we "abuse" the release tag, for example changing "mga" to "mgt"
+then if the user enables "tainted" (meaning he/she wants the rpms) urpmi 
+will automatically get the "mgt" ones, no questions asked...
+
+simple, and effective.
+
+and since the rebuild should be automatically on our bs, the versions
+will stay in sync.
+
+> But you are right this another set of issues to solve for dual life
+> packages.
+>
+
+I'd say go for the setup that we know works for Mageia 1, and re-evalute 
+the issue after...
+
+--
+Thomas
+