On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 04:43:42PM -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
> A. If someone packages software into Fedora, are they
obligated to
> maintain all current and future software which might depend on it
> in perpetuity?
I vote no to both. A is clearly a straw-man argument. If you are
maintaining package Foo, which is a dependency of Bar, you have no
obligation to support Bar. You do, however, have an obligation to
make an effort to support backward compatibility in Foo, so that Bar
is forced to upgrade itself to accommodate changes to Foo. Note,
An effort, sure. But an obligation? That's the same as A, especially
when the library changes so that Bar doesn't work but the new version
is required for other stuff.
however, that listing a specific version of Foo as a a dependency
rather than having *at least* that version makes all dependency
issues caused by this a Bar issue, not a Foo issue. And, of course,
And this is often practically the case.
B, of course, is an absurd idea, and I doubt that this was an
accident. Whoever maintains Foo has the obligation to see to it
that any and all packages that Foo depends on are listed properly,
but has no say over what other packages require Foo.
Listed? Where? And again, why obligated?
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader