On 11/15/2018 3:54 PM, Jason Tibbitts wrote:
And to add in an additional argument that we didn't have a decade ago:
We're actually trying to evolve our packaging now. EPEL with it's "old
RPM never changes" restriction is bad enough but fortunately limited in
scope. Having years of Fedora releases that can never evolve but which
still hold back progress in Rawhide is just too much.
Really, this is what our downstream distributions RHEL and CentOS are
for. That was the answer then and I don't see why it doesn't still
apply.
I'm not sure why punting like this is a good thing. RPM is a standard,
moving along at what one might expect a core component to do, but to the
extent that "evolving our packaging" means doing things at odds with or
in an incompatible way other distros (whether downstream, "downstream",
or not) this is not a feature, or very nice.
The use of *-rpm-macros packages to try to standardize deltas across
distros helps, but calls out for a more organized and systemic,
cross-distro and cross-release ecosystem approach. It's ugly enough now
that IMHO any LTS discussion needs to take this into consideration even
more.
"Let's remove Group tags from Rawhide specs because we don't like them,
even though every other distro uses them and they're staying in RPM" is
not a particularly positive recent example of Fedora stewardship over
packaging, and I'm sure any EL6 sysadmin can provide more examples from
the last decade.
-jc