Fwd: Heads-up on rpm 4.14 coming to rawhide, incl. soname bump
Resending to devel@, some mishap in earlier...
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Heads-up on rpm 4.14 coming to rawhide, incl. soname bump
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 20:50:30 +0300
From: Panu Matilainen <pmatilai(a)redhat.com>
To: devel-announce(a)lists.fedoraproject.org, Development discussions
related to Fedora <devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org>
Rpm 4.14 alpha is about to hit rawhide as per
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RPM-4.14. I realize we're a bit
late to the schedule, and much much later in the cycle than I'd like,
but lets try to get by. There's a soname bump involved so related
packages will need to be rebuilt, but Igor Gnatenko kindly promised to
take care of that.
From packagers POV, one of the bigger changes - debuginfo overhaul -
has been backported to 4.13 in rawhide for a while now, so there
shouldn't be any surprises on that front.
The other thing is the rpm macro engine which has seen by far its
biggest in the last 10+ years:
- Macro scoping is simplified, only macros %define'd inside parametric
macros are local, everything else is in global scope. This isn't as big
a change as is it may sound, because this is the way scoping only ever
really worked in previous versions.
- %{lua:} macros are scoped similarly to everything else. Previously
they could appear to be higher in the callchain than they are, causing
strange side-effects in already hard to debug complex macro constructs.
- Visibility is enforced per scope for automatic macros (ie %* %1 etc
that are created for parametric macros). In other words, nested macro
"calls" are more reliable as arguments from previous calls are not visible.
- Arguments to parametric macros are now expanded before execution.
- Arguments to parametric macros now support quoting (single and double)
For the average trivial macro usage, none of that will make a
difference. But I'd be almost shocked if nothing at all broke because of
this - former limitations and bugs might have necessiated tricks and
kludges that no longer work but also are not required any more etc. So
owners of complex macros, keep your eyes open.
Other than that, there are fairly massive changes to package reading and
signature checking, signal handling and whatnot, but they're mostly
under the hood. For details see http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.14.0 (WIP
as of now).
As usual, we'll be baby-sitting it closely for the first days and weeks
and try to resolve any issues ASAP, whether it's a bug in rpm or macros
needing updating to work with the new rules etc. Thank you for your
patience and understanding.
On behalf of the rpm-team,
- Panu -