On Saturday, July 10, 2010 12:56:19 am Orcan Ogetbil wrote: [snip some very good stuff...] > My own couple of cents, > Orcan
In my five years that I maintained the RPM set for PostgreSQL (1999-2004), my experience was very similar to what Orcan says here. In my case, it was for the upstream developers (I built RPMs for multiple distributions and hosted them at postgresql.org), but the distributors most of the time took the work I did and put it into the distribution with few changes. When Tom Lane, a PostgreSQL core developer, became employed at Red Hat, and a new crew of RPM maintainers came to the fore (Devrim for instance), I felt very comfortable handing that over to them, and they've done a great job in the six years since. With the infrastructure the Fedora project has today, it appears to be much easier to maintain high quality packages; however, if upstream developers keep lib-jumping (ala GNUradio with boost and others, and the current redland stuff Simon mentioned) there really isn't anything a packager can do about it when there are large numbers of dependencies; especially when those dependencies are large, mainstream, bread-and-butter packages like OpenOffice.org. You might be able to sweet-talk the other packagers into an uprev of a lib, but more often than not that's something that will go to the next release, not this one, where development and change is rampant, and the other packages are uprevved too. I ran into that numerous times, where a user would e-mail me and demand I build a newer PostgreSQL for an out of date distribution. While I would be as accommodating as possible, there were cases where it just wasn't possible. It's amazing how much people will demand when they don't have to do the work or pay for the work. One fellow in particular basically demanded that I build all the packages necessary to support PostgreSQL 7.4 (the last major version I maintained and the currently shipping major version in RHEL4 and derivatives) for Red Hat Linux 4.2. Yes, you read that right: Red Hat Linux (not RHEL, but RHL) 4.2, circa 1997. Wasn't going to happen, but the guy got somewhat abusive. I finally pointed him to a Red Hat 9 repository and told him to upgrade all the packages to those versions....he never replied to that. _______________________________________________ music mailing list [email protected] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/music
