[CentOS-devel] What name would be acceptable for Desktop version of CentOS?

Mon Jan 23 17:09:59 UTC 2012
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Yury V. Zaytsev <yury at shurup.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-01-23 at 10:38 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
>> EPEL's policy is to not replace any upstream packages so there is
>> generally no versioning issue if they are the only additional repo
>
> There is much more than just that to it, read inconsistent package
> naming, "public" libraries residing together with the application in the
> same package and the list goes on.
>
> On top of this there are things like packages compiled against libraries
> with different ABI versions etc., which very quickly gets messy once
> your package base becomes sufficiently large and you are mixing sources.
>
> All of this can only be fully resolved by a substantial effort to keep
> repositories compatible, which in turn requires the resources that
> neither RF or EPEL have to spare.

I think this misses the point that they can't be compatible for the
common case where RF wants to have a newer version of something that
in turn needs newer supporting libraries.  No amount of resources can
solve an inherent conflict when the distribution and packaging systems
don't have a concept of having multiple versions installed
concurrently.

> There have been some efforts to keep the repositories "reasonably"
> compatible from both sides, but that's pretty much as far as you can get
> given current situation; it will never be perfect.

The design is just not there to permit it.  Look at something as
simple and frequently desired as running two different java
applications under different jvm versions.  The OS itself has no
problem with that, but you can't get the packaging tools to deal with
it.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com