[Rpm-maint] Reserve ALT RPM tags range

[Vladimir D. Seleznev]

On Thu, Mar 01, 2018 at 09:58:58AM +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On 02/28/2018 12:03 AM, Vladimir D. Seleznev wrote:
> > Hello, rpm-maint@!
> > 
> > We in ALT Linux Team implemented some new RPM tags for our RPM package
> > header and RPM database. Since RPM tags are numerical identifiers and we
> > want to keep compatibility with mainstream RPM tools and packages, we
> > are requesting to reserve some RPM tag range for our purpose (around 100
> > RPM tags) to avoid the collision with RPM tag numbers, that can possibly
> > will be added to rpm.org in the future.
> 
> Yes we can reserve tags, it's not like we're going to run out of 32bit 
> integers anytime soon. However we're not going to foster distro 
> proprietary development & forks by blindly handing you 100 "do whatever 
> you want" tags. That's not how this works.

This is not about proprietary development, all ALT rpm features are
available in git repo at git.alt [1] [2].

It would be better to consolidate efforts but currently ALT rpm is a
fork with more than a decade-long history and a lot of good features
implemented such as autogenerated dependency for various interpreted
languages, set-versions, checks and a lot of other enhancements, and we
just can't drop these. Still we tried to port ours changes to new at
that time rpm 4.13 to keep our rpm closer to upstream (for now it
provides rpm(8) and some other, but no rpm-build).

> If a feature is interesting to Alt, there's more than a slight change 
> it's interesting to others as well, so you should always initially 
> target getting the thing upstream. The price of tag reservations is 
> discussing your plans upstream first, either here on rpm-maint or GH 
> ticket/PR.

And what about features ALT already has? They are integrated to ALT
package ecosystem with repositories with thousands of packages which
should be able to be installed and handled by package manager. And what
about the features like set-versions, which you don't want to integrate
[3]?

We asked for 100 rpm tags with a big reserve.

At the moment we want to use RPMTAG_AUTOINSTALLED in rpm db that helps
apt to determine what package was installed automatically as a
dependency of manually installed packages.

Second tag we want to use is RPMTAG_IDENTITY which determine a
characteristic of package build and is represented hash of significant
tags (in opposite to RPMTAG_SHA1HEADER, that is a hash of all package
tags).

[1] http://git.altlinux.org/gears/r/rpm.git
[2] http://git.altlinux.org/gears/r/rpm-build.git
[3] https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/issues/362

-- 
   With best regards,
   Vladimir D. Seleznev