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

[Jeff Horelick]

Hey all,

I have a suggestion to possibly make rebuilds a bit less painful (or
non-existant). I think this is a good idea because it seems like right now,
even before there was a new rebuild (ffmpeg/x264) in testing, there's
already another on the horizon (linjpeg/libpng, and it's a big one) and when
this isn't the case, there's usually a rebuild, when it leaves testing,
another rebuild comes in within days  and so on.

My suggestion would be to do what Debian does and when there's a library
release with a new soname, bump the old package and "rename" it (or for new
packages just do it from the start) and make the package name include the
soname version (like libjpeg7, libpng12, libtorrent-rasterbar4 and so on)
and when the soname is bumped upstream, just make libjpeg8 or libpng13 or
libtorrent-rasterbar5. This does clutter the repos a bit, but it pretty much
negates the need for rebuilds since (i believe) when the new GNOME for
example is released, it'll automagically build against libjpeg8 and libpng13
instead of the old ones and eventually, almost no packages will be using the
old ones. Once the package list for a large rebuild like the libpng/libjpeg
one is down to 3 or 4 items after like 3 months, you can probably rebuild
them and pull libjpeg7/libpng12 from the repos.

This would likely require 2 changes to pacman to implement:
1. Pacman would have to know that libpng8 is the newer version of libpng7
and prompt users to install that (or do it as a upgrade keeping the old
package).
2. Pacman would have to know something was removed from the repo and somehow
notify the user and possibly give them a [Y/n] to remove it from their
system. (I personally think this is a good idea to implement anyway).

-JD