Den 15 aug. 2017 13:46 skrev "Eli Schwartz" <eschwartz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>: On 08/15/2017 03:47 AM, Paul Gideon Dann via arch-general wrote: > Yes, partial upgrades are unsupported, but in practice this still happens, > usually not deliberately. For instance, I will quite often do a "pacman -S > <package>" without doing a full system update first, assuming that > *probably* nothing important has changed since the last update. It's a > sloppy practice, but humans cut corners: it happens. When a plugin relies > on a potentially unstable ABI (not many applications offer stable ABIs), > specifying that the plugin package requires that exact version of the > application will ensure that mistakes like this don't happen. > > If I see an error like "package x requires y=1.2.3" when installing a > package, the first thing I'll try is a system update, an obscure segfault > is avoided, and everyone's happy. So the failsafe does the job. It's good > defensive practice by the packaging team, I think. What. No, the packaging team explicitly does not care about you, and official policy is to yell at you for having once upon a time run pacman -Sy without -u I'm guessing that happens a lot though. Being explicit about the version for a module makes pacman itself handle the most obvious problems that would generate "support requests". If something did break long after you did those steps it may not be obvious you installed the main package and the module out-of-sync, so someone may yell at the packagers or devs for "introducing regressions/bugs" causes by this. Maybe they do care about the time they would spend yelling back at you if this was not the case? That is pretty deliberate on your part. -- Eli Schwartz
