On 09/02/10 10:36, fons@kokkinizita.net wrote:
On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 05:06:07PM -0700, Brendan Long wrote:
But wouldn't the optimal solution be doing the depends correctly on every package, so when your really slow user tries to update Firefox, it correctly informs them that they need to update everything to do that?
That could place the user before a difficult choice.
He may want *not* to update a particular package for any good reason (reported regression, adding unwanted dependencies, user base resistance, ...) while still wanting to install a new one that requires a new library version.
There is *nothing* wrong with having two (or more) .so versions on the same system. Each appp will use the one it was compiled and linked against.
If I have (on my system, not in a repo)
- application A depending on libfoo.so.1
and then pacman installs
- application B depending on libfoo.so.2
it can ignore the dependency of the installed A since it is already present. And it is the app that depends on the library, not the new library that depends on the app. Installing a new library should just leave A and its dependencies alone.
That is correct. There is nothing wrong with having two versions of a library on your system. As has been said repeatedly, it is just not what Arch officially supports doing. You can get old libraries from the AUR and manage them yourself.