I originally filed this as an issue for the EPEL Steering Committee. We discussed it at the last meeting, and the general consensus was to open a wider discussion about the topic.
In Fedora, it is allowed for compat packages to conflict with their non-compat equivalents. This is often necessary for compat -devel packages for things like unversioned soname symlinks, pkgconfig files, etc. It’s fairly rare that relocated development files are supported by packages that need to build against those development files. Relevant section from the guidelines:
It is acceptable to use
Conflicts:in some cases involving compat packages. These are the cases where it is not feasible to patch applications to look in alternate locations for the -compat files, so the foo-devel and foo-compat-devel packages need toConflict:. Whenever possible, this should be avoided.
In EPEL, we allow the same behavior between EPEL packages, but not between EPEL packages and RHEL packages. Relevant section from the guidelines:
Due to the EPEL policy of maintaining backwards compatibility, EPEL has a greater need for forward compat packages than Fedora. When creating, a compat package, note that it is okay to set a Conflicts between them as noted in the Conflicts Guidelines. At this time, this is only allowed for packages overriding packages in EPEL, not in RHEL Base.
This policy includes the phrase “at this time”, which has stuck out to me for a while. I didn’t write it in the original policy, but I do agree with the sentiment that it is worth revisiting. I think it would be appropriate to allow EPEL compat -devel packages to conflict with RHEL -devel packages. As mentioned in the policy, EPEL has a greater need for this than Fedora does, yet we are severely limited by not being able to ship correct compat -devel packages when the corresponding non-compat package is in RHEL. EPEL’s policy is that EPEL packages “enhance” the base distribution without “disturbing” or “replacing” packages from the base distribution. Most users do not install -devel packages, so they would not be disturbed by some -devel packages not being able to be installed at the same time. These compat package also have names that would be hard to mistake for the non-compat package. I’ve never heard of an instance of multiple conflicting -devel packages causing an issue in Fedora, or in EPEL (between EPEL packages). Most commonly these packages are installed during package builds of other software, which regular users can later consume without ever seeing the conflicts, because the corresponding compat library packages tend to be parallel installable and cause no disruption at all.
What are your thoughts about this potential adjustment of EPEL policy?