Re: Sorting out the prerequisites: Package names

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 8/27/05, Christian Lohmaier <cloph cup uni-muenchen de> wrote:
> 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"?

Because all of those debian distros are derived from the same core, so
that when one package depends on libfoo, they all know the package is
named libfoo, not libfoo2, nor libfoo-2, nor foo-2, all of which can
and are the case when speaking of a more varied (i.e.,
non-debian-derived) ecosystem of 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)

That's not actually particularly true. And at any rate, it isn't as
important as the applications that install on top- for example, all
the major distros now ship tools built on top of gtk and/or pygtk, and
many of them name those libraries differently. So if you pick 'one'
name for gtk, and attempt to use that name across all the major
distros, you'll end up uninstalling important parts of each distro,
because you picked one name for gtk without fixing all the
dependencies up the stack.

> - why shouldn't it be possible to do a good set of rpms that work
> equally well on every distro out there?

A very long list. I've gone into it in some depth on this list before,
so check the archives, or  just take my word for it. Ximian spent a
couple man-decades packaging things for different platforms, and did
not do that for fun. They did it because the alternative (one package
set everywhere) just didn't work.

> > 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"?

I mean no one is giving us a way to build packages on each distro.
This team is only being offered, tools-wise, an easy way to build
multi-distro packages, so even though that is vastly suboptimal, that
is what we have to deal with.

> 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.

I think you prove my point. To fix this problem, you must recompile
not just gnome, but every package that depends on GNOME. We can decide
here that the answer is to call gtk 'GTK+2', but then we not only have
to build GNOME for distro 1 and distro 3, we have to build their admin
tools, and whatever else they ship that depends on gtk. Or we can just
tell people to install our one-size-breaks-all binaries, I guess. :)

> 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.

The original goal of this team was to provide rpms and .debs. I don't
see any reason why this shouldn't remain the goal.

Luis