On 21 August 2015 at 12:20, Sam S. <smls75@gmail.com> wrote:

As the current maintainer of both packages, I'm not convinced that merging them is a good idea. Having them separate, makes it easier for people to specify what soname exactly they need without having to worry about implementation details like which is a symlink etc.

In an ideal world it could be a single package that provides=(libtiff3 libtiff4) so that other packages could continue to list either of them in their 'depends' array. But afaik, the AUR API and AUR helpers don't support that.

On the other hand, Doug's suggestion does make sense to me:

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 5:06 AM, Doug Newgard <scimmia@archlinux.info> wrote:

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Make libtiff3 the main package (since that's the upstream soname), then make a separate libtiff4 package that just has the symlinks and nothing else.

There's

...

a lot of other simplification I would do, as well, but it should work as-is.

I'll await the outcome of this merge request; if they stay separate I'll probably go ahead and do that. Also, can you elaborate on those other simplifications? (Maybe on the package comment page rather than here.)

That's a decent point. As a maintainter I'd rather still maintain a single package though. Maybe it'd be an idea to use a single pkgbase for both packages? I'm pretty sure that would allow other packages to name that as dependency, though I don't know if the current packages are easily migrate-able. But yeah, making libtiff3 the main package would be the least I'd do, especially because it makes more sense as a dependency circle (version 4 relying on version 3 rather than version 3 relying on 4, which looks like an old version relying on a new one). Sincerely, Joost Bremmer We apologize for the inconvenience"