[arch-general] Package management

[Leonardo Dagnino]

2014/1/5 Kalrish Bäakjen <kalrish.antrax at gmail.com>:
> 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!

A libfoo upgrade wouldn't break bar1 in most cases (unless there was a
major API change), because the external interface stays the same
(again, with exceptions). Library updates usually only change the
internal implementation and/or add new functions, which means code
made for previous versions will continue working.
-- 
Leonardo Dagnino