On Wed, 2018-05-23 at 18:45 -0400, Ben Cotton wrote:
On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 6:24 PM, Miro HronĨok
<mhroncok(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> How exactly is this change breaking users' software? We certainly want to
> avoid that.
>
If anything installed from outside our repos calls `/usr/bin/python`,
we break it. Unless we install the new python symlink package
alongside, but if we're doing that automatically, then how are we
testing the change? Maybe that is the intent, and I just
misunderstood.
The thing you're missing - which the Change doesn't explicitly state,
so it's understandable - is the effect of having the python2 package
Recommend the package with /usr/bin/python in it.
For *user* systems that will mean that package always gets installed
alongside python2, including that it should get installed on
update/upgrade. They could then manually remove it, but this is the
only way they could get into trouble - by default, both existing and
new installs should have /usr/bin/python. This is because dnf's default
behaviour is to install Recommends/Supplements.
However, for *package builds*, Recommends/Supplements are not
installed. So *package builds* which only BuildRequire python2 or
whatever would not get /usr/bin/python , and would thus fail. The
packager could always just add BuildRequires python-unversioned-command
to "fix" the problem, which is probably the fix we don't want them to
do, but at least then we have a handy way to identify recalcitrant
packages, and their maintainers can't pretend they weren't aware of the
problem and didn't actively decide to take the lazy way out.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net