Jonathan Billings wrote:
On Jul 28, 2017, at 1:56 PM, hw hw@gc-24.de wrote:
Are you sure that all the added complexity and implicitly giving up a stable platform by providing a mess of package versions is worth it? How are the plans about dealing with bug reports, say, for squid 2.7, for those who need that version for a feature which hasnīt been included in current versions yet? Just wait a bit until the distribution goes EOL? Is RH going to fix them once someone has bought their support?
I’m confused, are you talking about Gentoo, Fedora, CentOS or RHEL?
I´m talking about Centos here and am referring to experiences with other distributions at the same time.
Like Gentoo is great but horrible to keep up to date, and in doing so, you are expected to become a package manager yourself. Things introduced into Fedora might make their way into RHEL/Centos, and introducing multiversion-packages into Fedora might lead to introducing them into Centos.
Once they have been introduced, we need to become package managers much as with Gentoo in order to figure out which versions of which packages work together. And that´s just the tip of the iceberg.
What will happen when you report a bug in version N of package foo, perhaps a bug that was fixed in version N+2? Are they going to fix it, or will they wait until the distribution goes EOL and/or tell you to use version N+2 --- which you can´t use because feature X is missing in that version, which is why you are using version N.
Being able to use that very version N is the point of multiversion-packages. Not maintaining all provided versions of such packages accordingly would defeat the whole purpose.
Perhaps issues like this haven´t been considered yet, that´s why I´m providing feedback as was asked for, after finding out that the form they have prepared to get feedback doesn´t allow to do so. I´m aware that this is feedback they don´t want to hear and will either ignore or encounter with unkindness.
Perhaps I´m entirely wrong and misunderstanding what they´re trying to do, yet so far nobody has said so.