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

[fons at kokkinizita.net]

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. 

Ciao,

-- 
FA

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