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

[fons at kokkinizita.net]

On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 12:48:21AM +0100, Jan de Groot wrote:

> On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 13:37 -0700, Brendan Long wrote:
> > Couldn't the piecemeal update problem be fixed by just putting
> > version 
> > numbers in the depends() section in each updated package, so for the 
> > libpng rebuild for example, depends(... libpng>=#.#)? It would fix
> > the 
> > problem in the most obvious/arch-like way.
> 
> Some of us do that, so what happens next:
> 
> very-old-system# pacman -Sy firefox
> 
> pacman downloads new repo db, checks for firefox and downloads all the
> versioned dependencies. The user can run firefox fine now, but
> everything else on the system is broken because it wasn't updated for
> the new libpng.

Just leave the old libpng in place, and nothing will be
broken.
 
> Now this can be caught by using depends=('libpng>=1.4.0'
> 'libpng<1.5.0'), but what if upstream decides to fuck up the ABI in a
> release and bump soname in the middle of the 1.4 branch? I don't expect
> libpng to do that, but there's examples of others around. We can never
> be sure that the next incompatible version will be 1.5.0.

A binary of an app depends on the *major* version of a
library. Updates that do not change the major version
must be backward compatible. 

Ciao, 

-- 
FA

O tu, che porte, correndo si ?
E guerra e morte !