[4238] in Release_7.7_team
RHEL 3 and missing -devel packages
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Mar 10 12:08:51 2004
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 12:08:36 -0500
Message-Id: <200403101708.i2AH8aTF026331@error-messages.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
While building the Athena release, I've noticed that RHEL 3 is missing
a bunch of -devel packages. So far, I've noticed the lack of
libwnck-devel, libgsf-devel, and tcl-devel, and the web indicates that
there are many others. One can build these packages from the RHEL 3
SRPMs, but they have been omitted from the binary CDs and from Red Hat
Network.
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=101858 indicates
that this is intentional; they want to "limit ABI support liability."
But so far it feels like they chose the -devel packages to omit by
tossing dice. Do they really plan to ever desupport tcl? Or libwnck,
which continues to be part of GNOME 2.4 and the forthcoming 2.6? Why
do they ship a librsvg2-devel which doesn't work for lack of
libgsf-devel? If you follow the duplicates in the above bug report,
you can see that they are using three of these API-desupported
libraries in their own anaconda package.
So far, these things are easy enough for us to work around, but if
we're ever having another round of technical conversations with Red
Hat employees, we might want to mention this as a bogus misfeature of
their release. We would like our Linux distribution to be
self-hosting.
