Re: libraries being removed from the archive
On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 12:49:51PM +0300, Richard Braakman wrote:
> Common sense says otherwise :) You see, before we had katie and the
> testing scripts, such removal of orphan libraries was done manually.
> ("orphan" because they no longer had a source package that built them).
> Our experience was that packages that depended on them did not even start
> to get updated until after we removed the old library. As long as the
> old library was there, there was apparently no incentive for anyone
> to recompile.
Even now, there are a number of maintainers whose response to "your
package is uninstallable in unstable because libfoo1 was removed" is
"I'll wait until libfoo2 gets into testing and rebuild then". It often
requires some gentle education to demonstrate the deadlock, namely that
libfoo2 will not get into testing until the package in question is
rebuilt.
> Of course, these days we have gnome and kde depending on every library
> they can possibly find, and every other package depending on gnome
> or kde (or both, if they can manage it), so the terrain may have
> shifted somewhat...
It's certainly great fun when a library on which bits of both GNOME and
KDE depend changes soname (pilot-link, at the moment). I'd be almost
inclined towards the multiple source package approach at that point; you
can still provide incentive for people to recompile by removing the old
-dev package and filing "won't build on unstable" bugs (see gdbm).
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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