[arch-general] Package management

[Kalrish Bäakjen]

Hello,

Thanks for your explanation. I understand that it's not possible to
maintain every version of a package (and, as you've pointed out, it goes
against The Arch Way). However, it could still be useful for AUR packages,
or even official ones (I can't check it, but I was told that Arch keeps
official PKGBUILDs in an SVN repository. If that's the case, then it would
be possible to checkout a specific version of a PKGBUILD, for example, to
get an old version of X that is compatible with certain drivers).

About libraries, my knowledge is very little. Why do exist the unversioned
symlinks? I'm sure I'm missing something (perhaps the linker dereferences
links) but, if bar1 links with -lfoo, then, if libfoo is updated and
libfoo.so now points to a newer version, wouldn't bar1 break?

I completely agree with Arch's principles. Mainstream has to be pushed to
move on and use newer versions of libraries. I also personally loved
GNOME2, but I understand it used what we now consider "old" versions of
libraries, so it can't be sustained "as-is".

Thanks!