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

[Allan McRae]

On 09/02/10 10:36, fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
> 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.

That is correct.  There is nothing wrong with having two versions of a 
library on your system.  As has been said repeatedly, it is just not 
what Arch officially supports doing.  You can get old libraries from the 
AUR and manage them yourself.