Bug 472617

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 10 development cycle.
Changing version to '10'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

Confirmed in F10 release, with
   pssh-1.4.3-1.fc10
   putty-0.60-3.fc9

Are there any putty maintainers alive and reading bug reports?

Should we use alternatives to fix this issue? 

Going down that path, here is a patch for pssh.

You can use it to adapt putty. 

I used priority 50 for pssh, you can choose if you want putty to be higher or lower.

Please ping if doing the change.

Created attachment 333647 [details]
alternatives patch for pssh.

patch for comment #4.

I'm sorry, but how on earth did pssh pass review if it conflicts with putty, which has been in Fedora (Extras) 5 years longer?

I apologize for overlooking this bug until now.

Nothing in the Fedora Review process requires reviewers to check for conflicts. 
There's not even a guideline that suggests checking for potential conflicts (such as poorly chosen filenames in overloaded namespaces). There is no tool that performs automatic checks against all of Fedora. There's only repoquery and similar.

One consequence is that even some duplicate packages have entered the package collection. Once with old name and old version, a second time with new name and new version. ;)

From http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/ReviewGuidelines :

MUST: Packages must not own files or directories already owned by other packages. The rule of thumb here is that the first package to be installed should own the files or directories that other packages may rely upon. This means, for example, that no package in Fedora should ever share ownership with any of the files or directories owned by the filesystem or man package. If you feel that you have a good reason to own a file or directory that another package owns, then please present that at package review time.

Maybe our interpretations of that guideline aren't the same, but that's how I read it.

Regardless of the letter (or spirit) of the policy, I find it genuinely dishonest that it was claimed that such a verification was performed (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=460044#c3 ):

[x] Package does not own files or directories owned by other packages.

This suggests to me that we may be guilty of incomplete, cookie-cutter reviews, which is a very concerning implication.

I'm aware of those guidelines (I still do reviews occasionally). I bet the majority of reviewers only apply that item to a package's set of sub-packages (as in "avoiding files to be included in multiple sub-packages") and at most check whether a package is included with Fedora already, because as I pointed out there are no tools to compare an arbitrary package against a set of remote repositories [other than my script on my people page, which is only for advanced users].  I don't mean to defend reviewers, who don't discover implicit conflicts. There's just no evidence (such as reviews with quoted shell session output) that reviewers do more than checking that packages don't own "filesystem" or "man" directories, and not even that. Too many reviewers (as well as packagers) need step-by-step recipes on how to check something. The guidelines don't explain _how to_ meet the requirements of this MUST item, and additionally, they leave room for (mis-)interpretation.

What you write in the bottom of your comment 8 is something I agree with, but beyond that I don't comment on it here in bugzilla.

Could we please stop this ranting and fix the bug instead? 
We have wasted 6 months allready...

Yes, I would like to see this fixed.

Hi putty maintainers, 

is putty is active? I am looking into fixing #794567.