Aleksandar Kurtakov wrote:
So people would prefer no packages at all over packages in modules?
I see 2 reasons so far why some packages are module-only:
1. because a dependency of the package is module-only. That is exactly what
we want to prevent by proposing a ban on module-only packages.
2. because the maintainer wants to maintain only one version and chose the
modular one. Banning module-only packages will hopefully get the
maintainer to either maintain the non-modular version instead or to
maintain both versions after all.
I ask this as the traditional rpm way of doing is simply not working
and
that's the reason why many of us (old time Java packagers) just gave up,
it's purely impossible to satisfy the needs of multiple "major" packages
with same set of dependencies.
It is very much possible, just ship parallel-installable compatibility
packages. For Java JARs, you can simply ship the non-default versions as
name-version.jar (which is actually how most upstreams ship their binaries
as well) rather than just name.jar, then they won't conflict. (Of course,
the package name has to be suffixed with the version as well, as for all
compatibility packages.)
Using modules for that purpose is broken by design because you are just
pushing the problem from the packager to the end user, who will not be able
to install the 2 unrelated packages on the same machine due to conflicting
dependencies.
Kevin Kofler