[csw-maintainers] Obsoleting packages

[Philip Brown]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Hi Phil,
>
>
> From the task to clean package names in release "dublin" we are targetting
> I estimate about 500 renames. Handling this on an individual basis is IMHO
> prone to errors while always using intermediate packages is a simple, clean
> and easy way to achieve consistent updating.

It may be "simple, clean and easy" from the perspective of someone
generating a bunch of packages to dump out. But from the perspective
of integrating into our package database, its very messy.

Even setting aside the issue of potentially having 500 "junk" entries
in our databases... which isnt so nice...., there's the issue of file
collisions.

if you have CSWoldpkg, and CSWnewpkg, and they both have the same files...
you cant register "newpkg" until "oldpkg" has been cleaned out of the
collision database!



> Following the "I"-approach consistently would probably require rebuilding
> the whole set and pushing 500 packages at once which would be much harder
> to do right and to verify.

I would say just the opposite. Using the "i" approach, would lead to
doing smaller sets of packages at one time, instead of dumping 100
into the update stream all at once.

Seems like the reason we have so many different perl packages, is that
only a handful are actually *shared*.
Most of the time, perl CPAN modules  are used by only 1 or two
packages, I think.
(please note I said "most", but not all  :-)