Randy Barlow wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-11-06 at 01:18 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> The big difference is that Gentoo is source-based, whereas Fedora is
>> binary-based. So where Gentoo needs to ship only one ebuild (the
>> equivalent of a specfile) for foo-1.2.3 that the user can then
>> compile against different choices of dependencies, we need to ship
>> binary RPMs of that same foo-1.2.3 version for each and every
>> combination (exponentially many) of dependency versions that we want
>> to support. Which is one of the unsolved issues with  our Modularity
>> implementation, too.
> 
> This seems to be like more of a complication for the packager than for
> the user, right? I was commenting on the user experience and not the
> packager experience.
>
> I agree that the packager experience does have the crazy combinatorics,
> as adamw pointed out, but I discussed that in my reply to him.

It results in a poor user experience if the combination the user needs is 
then not available.

> You are right that the varying choices of dependencies creates
> exponential growth, but modularity has conflicts too (you can't install
> two modules that need conflicting dependency versions) and I don't see
> a way to offer the user what we are talking about without having
> conflicts.

Me neither, which is why I think it should just not be allowed. At the very 
least, a default version of something must not require a non-default version 
of a dependency that is not parallel-installable with the default version of 
that dependency.

>> I don't understand why people dislike compatibility libraries so
>> much.
> 
> I'll qualify my position as not so much that I strongly dislike it, but
> more that I would prefer if the package metadata could formally store
> the data for me, rather than encoding it in the name.

The issue is that this complicates the package management logic 
significantly (adding one more dimension to the existing 4 (NEVR)) and 
brings no measurable gain compared to just suffixing the package name.

        Kevin Kofler
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