2014/1/5 Kalrish Bäakjen <kalrish.antrax@gmail.com>:
Hello,
Thanks for your explanation. I understand that it's not possible to maintain every version of a package (and, as you've pointed out, it goes against The Arch Way). However, it could still be useful for AUR packages, or even official ones (I can't check it, but I was told that Arch keeps official PKGBUILDs in an SVN repository. If that's the case, then it would be possible to checkout a specific version of a PKGBUILD, for example, to get an old version of X that is compatible with certain drivers).
About libraries, my knowledge is very little. Why do exist the unversioned symlinks? I'm sure I'm missing something (perhaps the linker dereferences links) but, if bar1 links with -lfoo, then, if libfoo is updated and libfoo.so now points to a newer version, wouldn't bar1 break?
I completely agree with Arch's principles. Mainstream has to be pushed to move on and use newer versions of libraries. I also personally loved GNOME2, but I understand it used what we now consider "old" versions of libraries, so it can't be sustained "as-is".
Thanks!
A libfoo upgrade wouldn't break bar1 in most cases (unless there was a major API change), because the external interface stays the same (again, with exceptions). Library updates usually only change the internal implementation and/or add new functions, which means code made for previous versions will continue working. -- Leonardo Dagnino