Hi,
Eli and I disagree about how dependency conflicts should be handled when packaging. This was prompted by the libxfont dependency conflict arising from recent xorgproto changes [1].
My position in this case: it would be really easy to avoid this conflict, by adding libxfont to the Replaces() array of xorgproto. This would cause libxfont to be automatically uninstalled upon sysupgrade, which is nice because it's an obsolete and now-useless package.
I think this kind of automatic handling of dependencies and obsolete packages is desirable whenever possible, precisely because it is *automated*. On the contrary, with the current libxfont/xorgproto situation, every Arch user has to spend time to *manually* fix the dependency issue (by removing libxfont).
As packagers, I believe we have better things to do than purposefully waste the time of Arch users. Especially for dependency conflicts like this one, which is so trivial and boring: libxfont should clearly be deleted, and an Arch user will learn nothing interesting by having to manually fix the dependency issue.
But it seems that this position is not shared by Eli (and possibly others), who thinks that Arch users should be able to figure out this kind of issues by themselves. I agree, but this is not a reason to force boring tasks on them, while we could have easily avoided the issue in the first place.
If there are some existing rules or "traditions" that address this question, please provide pointers. Otherwise, I would like to know if there is a consensus one way or the other.
Thanks, Baptiste
On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:56:33 +0100 Baptiste Jonglez baptiste@bitsofnetworks.org wrote:
Hi,
Eli and I disagree about how dependency conflicts should be handled when packaging. This was prompted by the libxfont dependency conflict arising from recent xorgproto changes [1].
My position in this case: it would be really easy to avoid this conflict, by adding libxfont to the Replaces() array of xorgproto. This would cause libxfont to be automatically uninstalled upon sysupgrade, which is nice because it's an obsolete and now-useless package.
I saw the direct emails before this one, so I'll just quote part of my reply here:
Replaces is for when packages are renamed, nothing more. That is NOT in any way what happened here, libxfont and libxfont2 are different libraries. Should GTK3 replace GTK2? Qt5 replace Qt4?
On 02/13/2018 06:56 PM, Baptiste Jonglez wrote:
Hi,
Eli and I disagree about how dependency conflicts should be handled when packaging. This was prompted by the libxfont dependency conflict arising from recent xorgproto changes [1].
[...]
Is there a reason you took a private disagreement to the public mailing lists:
- regarding which you have confused me for the primary person disagreeing with you - when in fact there are three people who directly disagree with you on that very issue, as I told you in that private discussion - regarding which this public post seems to essentially exist in order to, I dunno, shame me into responding in view of the world at large, again despite my not being the only or indeed the primary person who you are actually disagreeing with?
I would like to register my formal objection to your treating this as a personal disagreement between the two of us. I explained why this was not an "Eli Schwartz thinks so" thing in that private email -- you disliked my explanation and asked for more proof, while *simultanously* CC'ing arch-dev-public with claims about how I "and possibly others" disagree with you.
You did not give me a chance to respond to your new question before CC'ing arch-dev-public.
Eli Schwartz via arch-dev-public arch-dev-public@archlinux.org hat am 14. Februar 2018 um 01:48 geschrieben:
On 02/13/2018 06:56 PM, Baptiste Jonglez wrote:
Hi,
Eli and I disagree about how dependency conflicts should be handled when packaging. This was prompted by the libxfont dependency conflict arising from recent xorgproto changes [1].
[...]
Is there a reason you took a private disagreement to the public mailing lists:
So, uh, how often does this happen that we need to make a big fuss on the matter? The last manual intervention was nearly a year ago with ca-certificates-utils. If anything we should argue why there was no news post on archlinux.org
Alad
On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 02:52:16 +0100 (CET) Alad Wenter via arch-dev-public arch-dev-public@archlinux.org wrote:
Eli Schwartz via arch-dev-public arch-dev-public@archlinux.org hat am 14. Februar 2018 um 01:48 geschrieben:
On 02/13/2018 06:56 PM, Baptiste Jonglez wrote:
Hi,
Eli and I disagree about how dependency conflicts should be handled when packaging. This was prompted by the libxfont dependency conflict arising from recent xorgproto changes [1].
[...]
Is there a reason you took a private disagreement to the public mailing lists:
So, uh, how often does this happen that we need to make a big fuss on the matter? The last manual intervention was nearly a year ago with ca-certificates-utils. If anything we should argue why there was no news post on archlinux.org
Alad
A news post for something completely routine? Has Arch become so boring that people don't know how to deal with the simplest conflict?
On 13-02-18, Eli Schwartz via arch-dev-public wrote:
On 02/13/2018 06:56 PM, Baptiste Jonglez wrote:
Hi,
Eli and I disagree about how dependency conflicts should be handled when packaging. This was prompted by the libxfont dependency conflict arising from recent xorgproto changes [1].
[...]
Is there a reason you took a private disagreement to the public mailing lists:
- regarding which you have confused me for the primary person disagreeing with you
- when in fact there are three people who directly disagree with you on that very issue, as I told you in that private discussion
- regarding which this public post seems to essentially exist in order to, I dunno, shame me into responding in view of the world at large, again despite my not being the only or indeed the primary person who you are actually disagreeing with?
I'm sorry if you feel offended, but I'm not sure what I am shaming you into exactly.
- I initially thought I had a disagreement with you, because you were the one I saw closing bug reports about the issue. This is why I emailed you directly.
- your answer made it clear that we *do* disagree, but you also said that your position is shared with other members of the community: what you called "a longstanding tradition of not considering these type of issues to be valid bugs", and the fact that Doug and arojas also closed bug reports about the issue.
- so, I decided to start a public discussion about the issue, with the starting point that we *do* indeed disagree about it.
Quite frankly, the packaging issue itself is minor, I was just surprised of the way it was handled: spending time to close several bug reports about the issue and telling people that they are stupid [2], instead of just fixing the issue in the first place. It goes against (my idea of) common sense.
Now, the point of this email on arch-dev-public was to discuss the packaging issue and whether it is a policy *not* to fix these kind of issues. I'm fine either way, I'll know for next time.
Baptiste
[2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/57393#comment166572
I would like to register my formal objection to your treating this as a personal disagreement between the two of us. I explained why this was not an "Eli Schwartz thinks so" thing in that private email -- you disliked my explanation and asked for more proof, while *simultanously* CC'ing arch-dev-public with claims about how I "and possibly others" disagree with you.
You did not give me a chance to respond to your new question before CC'ing arch-dev-public.
Baptiste Jonglez baptiste@bitsofnetworks.org hat am 14. Februar 2018 um 10:19 geschrieben:
Quite frankly, the packaging issue itself is minor, I was just surprised of the way it was handled: spending time to close several bug reports about the issue and telling people that they are stupid [2], instead of just fixing the issue in the first place. It goes against (my idea of) common sense.
I was initially surprised by the force of the reaction you linked, but then saw this was a response to the *eleventh* request. That makes it a natural response to people being relentlessly obnoxious.
About the package itself, I agree that if libxfont2 were an *actual* replacement of libxfont, then the corresponding field should be filled in. According to upstream [3], the API/ABI is however entirely different, with according .so names. As such, you'd make use of packages the rely on the old API impossible solely for a short-term convenience.
Alad
Alad Wenter via arch-dev-public arch-dev-public@archlinux.org hat am 14. Februar 2018 um 12:26 geschrieben:
Baptiste Jonglez baptiste@bitsofnetworks.org hat am 14. Februar 2018 um 10:19 geschrieben:
Quite frankly, the packaging issue itself is minor, I was just surprised of the way it was handled: spending time to close several bug reports about the issue and telling people that they are stupid [2], instead of just fixing the issue in the first place. It goes against (my idea of) common sense.
I was initially surprised by the force of the reaction you linked, but then saw this was a response to the *eleventh* request. That makes it a natural response to people being relentlessly obnoxious.
About the package itself, I agree that if libxfont2 were an *actual* replacement of libxfont, then the corresponding field should be filled in. According to upstream [3], the API/ABI is however entirely different, with according .so names. As such, you'd make use of packages the rely on the old API impossible solely for a short-term convenience.
And I forgot the link again:
[3] https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2015-December/002661.html
Alad
Just because I had to look up the details of this....
- xorgproto replaces a lot of packages, including fontsproto: :: Replace fontsproto with extra/xorgproto? [Y/n]
- libxfont requires fontsproto, so this causes the following: :: libxfont: removing fontsproto breaks dependency 'fontsproto>=2.1.3'
- people with systems older than 2016-11-16, may have libxfont as xorg-server depended on it until that time. Now xorg-server depends on libxfont2.
- libxfont2 does not replace libxfont, as it is a completely different API.
- libxfont was removed from the Arch repos somewhere in April or May 2017. So nothing official depends on libxfont.
I don't think it is unreasonable to expect people to run "pacman -Qi libxfont", see it was installed as a dependency and no package depends on it and remove it. There also does not seem to be a correct way of us to handle this - joys of rolling release!
Funny thing... people using yaourt probably removed this package as I believe it highlights dependencies that are no longer needed after an upgrade!
A
On 14.02.2018 12:55, Allan McRae via arch-dev-public wrote:
Funny thing... people using yaourt probably removed this package as I believe it highlights dependencies that are no longer needed after an upgrade!
How about having this feature in pacman, maybe with an indicator if the package is still in a repository?
Florian
On 14/02/18 22:28, Florian Pritz via arch-dev-public wrote:
How about having this feature in pacman, maybe with an indicator if the package is still in a repository?
pacman -Qtd
On 14-02-18, Allan McRae via arch-dev-public wrote:
Just because I had to look up the details of this....
- xorgproto replaces a lot of packages, including fontsproto:
:: Replace fontsproto with extra/xorgproto? [Y/n]
- libxfont requires fontsproto, so this causes the following:
:: libxfont: removing fontsproto breaks dependency 'fontsproto>=2.1.3'
- people with systems older than 2016-11-16, may have libxfont as
xorg-server depended on it until that time. Now xorg-server depends on libxfont2.
libxfont2 does not replace libxfont, as it is a completely different API.
libxfont was removed from the Arch repos somewhere in April or May
- So nothing official depends on libxfont.
I don't think it is unreasonable to expect people to run "pacman -Qi libxfont", see it was installed as a dependency and no package depends on it and remove it. There also does not seem to be a correct way of us to handle this - joys of rolling release!
Thanks for the detailed analysis with the dates. I see now that using the replaces() field in this case is technically incorrect.
I was annoyed by this issue which seemed simple to fix, and consequently pissed off by Eli's violent and insulting reaction on the bug tracker.
I still think it is wholly inappropriate to treat people this way (whatever the reasons, eleventh reopen request or not), but Eli, please accept my apologies for rounding up on you based on murky assumptions.
Funny thing... people using yaourt probably removed this package as I believe it highlights dependencies that are no longer needed after an upgrade!
On 14/02/18 22:28, Florian Pritz via arch-dev-public wrote:
How about having this feature in pacman, maybe with an indicator if the package is still in a repository?
pacman -Qtd
For the same list, but filtered on packages that are not in any repository ("foreign" packages):
pacman -Qtdm
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