On Tuesday 01 July 2003 21:03, Austin wrote: > On 2003.07.01 14:04, Andi Payn wrote: > > The current versions of libsigc++1.0 and libsigc++1.2 can't coexist. This > > means that you can't have both 1.x and 2.x versions of gtk--, gnome--, > > and glade--. But there's no good reason that they shouldn't be able to; > > it's just an artifact of the packaging. And there are plenty of good > > reasons to want both around. With a few minor changes to the 1.0 version, > > I was able to make them coexist. > > Well, if gtk1/2, gnome1/2, glade1/2, gtkmm1/2, gnomemm1/2, etc, etc, were > all taken care of by only one person, this might not happen. But when > three or four people try to put these packages together, weird things > happen.
Well, it'd be a lot for one person to take care of, and it's much more important for gtk (which is used by pretty much everyone) to be stable than, say, gnomemm devel packages, so I can understand why it's split among three or four people. In other words, this is exactly the kind of thing that we should expect to be caught by outsiders like me.... By the way, I should have mentioned that in this case, unlike most other packages, it's possible and desirable for the -devel packages to coexist as well. Plus, I'm not sure I fixed this properly; the actual problem seems to be that the 1.2 packages are not just providing, but also obsoleting (regardless of version), the "old-fashioned" name libsigc++-devel, so the fix really should be to 1.2, not 1.0. Also, I think the same problem exists in other packages. Both libmysql12 and libmysql10 provide and obsolete MySQL-Shared; both gimp1_3 and gimp provide and obsolete gimp-data-min; etc., in every case without regard to version, so these packages that coexisted a month ago no longer can. Maybe someone needs to go through the whole slew of packages and look for incorrect obsoletes tags? Or maybe some recent change in the process is behind this problem and needs to be fixed? If this is yet another artifact of the big changeover that will go away automagically long before 9.2, then I can live with keeping the old packages, modifying the specfiles locally, or doing --nodeps hackery until then. Meanwhile, I'd like to know whether this is a known problem, or whether I should submit bugs for each instance that I find? (Although it may be just as easy to submit fixed specfiles instead....) > Seems odd that Mandrake would like to be a development platform, yet so > many important developer tools are in contribs and often broken or > outdated: eric, pyqt, gnomemm2... Presumably these are in contribs because not many developers demand them. Of course this may be circular--maybe if they were in main, and well-supported, there would be more pyqt and gnomemm developers using Mandrake, so there would be more demand, etc., but I suspect this isn't the case. Mandrake is being used by many developers today, and gnomemm isn't as popular as its adherents might wish....
