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

[hollunder]

Excerpts from Brendan Long's message of 2010-02-09 01:06:07 +0100:
> On 02/08/2010 04:48 PM, 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> >
> >    
> 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?
> 

Right now bugs regarding that kind of thing are ignored, I got such a
case with netsurf. It was build against the new version and only
required an older one according to the deps array. Response -> Not a Bug