Re: Sorting out the prerequisites: Package names

[Christian Lohmaier <cloph cup uni-muenchen de>]

Hi Luis, *,

I'm happy to recieve a response at last, but still I totally disagree,
see below.

On Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 04:56:48PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 8/15/05, Christian Lohmaier <cloph cup uni-muenchen de> wrote:
> > 
> > a while ago I asked for help in creating a list of official package
> > names to be used for RPM-packages (so that requires can be set properly
> > and that the packagenames don't conflict with older/other versions that
> > can be installed along with the package).
> > 
> > For this I created a wiki-page on live.gnome.org - but unfortunately
> > nobody did jump in :-(
> > 
> > So here again I ask for feedback/contribution/discussion.
> > http://live.gnome.org/PackagingProject/PackageNames
> 
> Christian-
> I did not respond earlier because, frankly, I don't think that
> 'universal' package names make sense- in general, the goal (IMHO)
> should be to write packages that work well on specific distro (i.e.,
> match each distro's own naming scheme), not something that works
> equally poorly across all distros.

Why do you imply that a cross distro specfile is automatically a bad
one? Why do you think debian manages to provide the same debs for a
variety of debian-"distros"?
It is becasue they have guidelines, things other packages can rely on.

Given that gnome (exclude gstreamer here) is rather self-contained (only
very few external dependancies and on top of that these are very common)
- why shouldn't it be possible to do a good set of rpms that work
equally well on every distro out there?

Just please name some of the problems you see when installing a complete
gnome on different distros.
Honestly, the only problem I see is different naming of the packages the
distribution may have installed. This can be solved by making one single
meta/virtual-package that takes care of this.
  
> That said, this was all very hypothetical until recently- if Mark is
> giving us a way to easily build multi-distro packags, then

There is no problem in building multi-distro packages at all.

> multi-distro naming is a problem we need to solve, while per-distro
> naming is not, unfortunately, a problem we actually have. So we should
> probably, uh, go ahead and solve it :)

Say what? You don't have a per-distro naming problem? (Or was it
supposed to read "now"?

Just take this small example:
GTK.
Distro1 names their package GTK+2
Distro2 names their package GTK2+
Distro3 names their package libgtk2

So to support these three distros without clearing out the
package-naming problem, *every package* would have to contain three
different "Requires:" lines along with a complex method of checking the
various distros during building.

While this may be solvable for one or two packages, this gets worse when
having a look at the library-stuff. There naming schemes differ even
more.

Let alone the package building-stuff. When you want to create packages
for each system, that means you don't only have to provide one set of
RPMs, but you need diskspace to hold four or more sets of RPMs. This
isn't something I would consider a superior solution.

Furthermore: I thought the goal of the GPP was not to provide binary
packages, but to allow curious users to download the tarballs and build
RPMs from these tarballs without further modification.

ciao
Christian
-- 
NP: Paradise Lost - Forever Failure