On 2020-04-06 20:22:05 +0200 (+0200), Radosław Piliszek wrote:
Just to clarify - I'm actually in favor of dropping the plain coinstallability rule.
I wrote this before: we have different ways to ensure separation: virtual envs and OCI images. People can and do use them.
I don't think this rule brings any benefits nowadays, very diverse projects can be used together even if they decide they need different versions of some internal library - for whatever reason. What counts are well-defined interfaces - this is the only way to ensure cofunctionality, other measures are simply workarounds. ;-) [...]
Just to be clear, we didn't add rules about coinstallability to make *our* upstream lives easier. We did it so that downstream distros don't have to provide and support multiple versions of various dependencies. What you're in effect recommending is that we stop supporting installation within traditional GNU/Linux distributions, since only package management solutions like Docker or Nix are going to allow us to punt on coinstallability of our software. You're *also* saying that our libraries now have to start supporting users on a broader variety of their own old versions, and also support/test working with a variety of different versions of their own dependencies, or that we also give up on having any abstracted Python libraries and go back to re-embedding slightly different copies of the same code in all OpenStack services. -- Jeremy Stanley