* Branden Robinson (branden@debian.org) wrote: > On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 09:39:25PM -0400, Eric Dorland wrote: > > Wow, the last thing I expected was people to have a problem with the > > name :) Well I'm open to other suggestions if necessary. I think its a > > good virtual package name in that it almost certainly won't conflict > > with any actual package's name. > > Well, how about just "automake", since it's becoming a pure virtual > package[1]? > > The packages which B-D on automake* will need to do the "real | virtual" > thing for pure virtual packages anyway. Well the point is they shouldn't do this. They should almost certainly just depend on a single version of automake, because if some other version of automake is installed things could very well break. Of course ideally packages shouldn't depend on automake. > I.e., the packages on your list should be updated to > Build-Depends: automake1.4 | automake > > Let's consider the two partial upgrade scenarios: > > 1) woody user pulls down a sid/sarge version of one of the affected > packages, e.g. abiword > abiword in sid/sarge will Depend on automake1.4 (or automake1.5, > or 1.7, etc.), and apt-get build-dep will pull in the required > automake package. > > 2) woody user pulls down a sid/sarge version of automake{1.5,1.7} > Hmm, well, these will "Provide: automake" and the woody version > of abiword will suddenly become unbuildable, because automake 1.5 > and 1.7 will presumably vomit when they encounter > automake1.4-isms. Right, so why would you want to do this? It should just build-dep on a specific version of automake no? > These are "merely" build-dependencies, so I don't actually think this is > a serious problem. As you said, people shouldn't be Build-Depending on > automake anyway. I don't think there is all that much we can do to > insulate people from these sorts of problems with automake breaking > compatiblity so frequently. Well if someone build-deps on a certain version of automake. This does make it harder to drop older versions of automake however. But as you point out ---> Don't build-depend on automake! <--- > To mitigate the potential fun and excitement, I suppose we could always > ask the Stable Release Manager if he'd be willing to allow uploads of > the affected packages to stable-updates that would either: > 1) drop the B-D on automake altogether > 2) Build-Conflict with automake1.5, automake1.7 > > What do you think? I think he would never go for it :) > As a final suggestion, if there are really that many Makefile.am's in > the world that will only work with specific versions of automake, > perhaps we shouldn't have a virtual package at all. The existence of a > virtual package implies a degree of interchangeability among the > packages that provide it. If that's just not the case with automake, we > shouldn't try to advertise it. That is a good point. They are really all trying to do the same thing so I think the virtual package makes sense, at least to let other packages recommend or suggest automake packages. > After all, we do not have shared library packages Provide versions of > themselves with the version number stripped off. > > Thanks for your efforts in trying to steer us away from the auto* > shoals. I'm trying, feels like swimming upstream sometimes :P -- Eric Dorland <dorland@lords.com> ICQ: #61138586, Jabber: hooty@jabber.com 1024D/16D970C6 097C 4861 9934 27A0 8E1C 2B0A 61E9 8ECF 16D9 70C6 -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS d- s++: a-- C+++ UL+++ P++ L++ E++ W++ N+ o K- w+ O? M++ V-- PS+ PE Y+ PGP++ t++ 5++ X+ R tv++ b+++ DI+ D+ G e h! r- y+ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
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