On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 11:54:43PM +0100, fons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 12:36:55AM +0200, Ionut Biru wrote: > > > you are focusing only on .so which is different but this schema will > > work only if the package is split in lib, -dev, whatever as now, the > > headers will conflict since it have the same name on the same > > location. > > Not true. When a new version is installed, the > headers are replaced, and the symlink from > 'libfoo.so' is modified to the new version. > > In a link step you refer to the lib as '-lfoo' > which gets translated (via that symlink) into > 'libfoo.so.N', the newest installed version. > > If you have separate -dev and -lib packages > (and Arch hasn't AFAICS) it is the package > manager's job to always replace both in sync. > Nothing magical about that, all distros I used > before just did it that way. > Afais a pointless discussion. Arch _is_ a rolling distro. I use Arch for almost 3 years now and I never ran into a major upgrade breakage since. Upgrading in cycles of 4-6 days is a sane behaviour on produtive systems; this also covers almost all mirror sync delays. I think this should be mentioned in the wiki. A simple "pacman -Qu" returns the upgrade situation, so it's quite easy to decide if this is a major or "normal" upgrade. Sure this requires some knowledge of the system, but this is what Arch is all about. And real major upgrades (like libpng) are quite seldom anyway. --
