ARM dropbox repo change

[Daniel Drake]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Paul Fox <pgf at laptop.org> wrote:
> can you clarify the final point?  if a package is in an f14 dropbox,
> and it also exists in the fedora repo, what is the result if:
>    - the dropbox version is the same as the fedora version?
>    - the dropbox version is newer than the fedora version?
>    - the dropbox version is older than the fedora version?  (but i
>        hope the answer to this is the obvious "use fedora")

In all cases the dropbox wins and the build system does not even look in Fedora.

This is noted briefly here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/RPM_Dropbox
I will expand on the description.


The reasoning here is as follows: if we fork package foobar-1.0-1.fc14
for whatever exceptional reason causes us to do that, we would do it
as foobar-1.0-1.fc14.olpc1.

If Fedora then produced a trivial update to that package such as
foobar-1.0-2.fc14, we still want our OLPC package to "win". If we were
looking at Fedora too, the unforked Fedora version would silently win
and we wouldn't even realise that our fork had been lost.

A similar thing happens for the kernel. OLPC ships a x86 kernel with a
lower version number than that of Fedora - we obviously want OLPC's
kernel to "win" regardless of what Fedora does.

Also, remember that this dropbox system is only supposed to be used in
exceptional cases. So regardless of any imperfections in system
behaviour, the effects should be very limited.

> part of my question is this -- if, say, kbdshim needs a quick fix,
> it sounds like you're saying there's no point in my putting it in
> my dropbox at all.  i should test with my own (private) rpm, and
> release nothing but the tarball for you or peter to deal with.  is
> that right?

Thats right.
(you are of course welcome to do the Fedora packaging yourself, but
equally I understand that this is an additional task you might prefer
not to be subjected to)

Daniel