2014/1/5 Kalrish Bäakjen <kalrish.antrax@xxxxxxxxx>: > 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
