[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[vlad]

On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 11:54:43PM +0100, fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 12:36:55AM +0200, Ionut Biru wrote:
> 
> > you are focusing only on .so which is different but this schema will
> > work only if the package is split in lib, -dev, whatever as now, the
> > headers will conflict since it have the same name on the same
> > location.
> 
> Not true. When a new version is installed, the
> headers are replaced, and the symlink from
> 'libfoo.so' is modified to the new version.
> 
> In a link step you refer to the lib as '-lfoo'
> which gets translated (via that symlink) into
> 'libfoo.so.N', the newest installed version.
> 
> If you have separate -dev and -lib packages
> (and Arch hasn't AFAICS) it is the package
> manager's job to always replace both in sync.
> Nothing magical about that, all distros I used
> before just did it that way.
> 
Afais a pointless discussion. Arch _is_ a rolling distro.
I use Arch for almost 3 years now and I never ran into a major upgrade
breakage since. Upgrading in cycles of 4-6 days is a sane behaviour on
produtive systems; this also covers almost all mirror sync delays. 
I think this should be mentioned in the wiki. 
A simple "pacman -Qu" returns the upgrade situation, 
so it's quite easy to decide if this is a major or "normal" upgrade.
Sure this requires some knowledge of the system, but this is what Arch
is all about. And real major upgrades (like libpng) are quite seldom anyway. 


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