Re: Propossed Project: Odyssey
On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, Timothy H. Keitt wrote:
> Better yet, lets convince package maintainers not to unnecessarily
> update all their dependencies to the latest libs in unstable so that
> packages can be easily backported with 'apt-get -b source ...' My guess
> is that 60-90% of the packages in unstable do not require the latest lib
> versions to build, but that maintainers are defaulting their
> dependencies to be >= the latest version in unstable for no reason (of
> course, package name changes and package reorganization can throw a
> wrench into things). If maintainers default to only depend on what is in
> stable whenever possible, many many deb packages would compile just fine
> on both stable and unstable.
This shows a deep misunderstanding of the way shared libraries work.
If a library is changed, and uploaded, it may require an update to its
/var/lib/dpkg/info/*.shlibs file. When pkgs are then rebuilt against that
library, the pkg-version dependency info is taken from this file. That is
what causes newer libraries to be depended on. It is not a conscious effect
on the maintainer.
Additionally, if a new version of a package comes out, that depends on a new
library, do you think that the new package should not be allowed into debian,
on the fact that backporting to an older version of debian would be
problematic? That line of thinking means nothing would ever be upgraded.
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