On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 12:48:21AM +0100, Jan de Groot wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 13:37 -0700, Brendan Long wrote:
> > Couldn't the piecemeal update problem be fixed by just putting
> > version
> > numbers in the depends() section in each updated package, so for the
> > libpng rebuild for example, depends(... libpng>=#.#)? It would fix
> > the
> > problem in the most obvious/arch-like way.
>
> Some of us do that, so what happens next:
>
> very-old-system# pacman -Sy firefox
>
> pacman downloads new repo db, checks for firefox and downloads all the
> versioned dependencies. The user can run firefox fine now, but
> everything else on the system is broken because it wasn't updated for
> the new libpng.
Just leave the old libpng in place, and nothing will be
broken.
> Now this can be caught by using depends=('libpng>=1.4.0'
> 'libpng<1.5.0'), but what if upstream decides to fuck up the ABI in a
> release and bump soname in the middle of the 1.4 branch? I don't expect
> libpng to do that, but there's examples of others around. We can never
> be sure that the next incompatible version will be 1.5.0.
A binary of an app depends on the *major* version of a
library. Updates that do not change the major version
must be backward compatible.
Ciao,
--
FA
O tu, che porte, correndo si ?
E guerra e morte !
