On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 09:19:06PM -0700, Joshua Haberman wrote: > * Brian May (bam@snoopy.apana.org.au) wrote: > > On Mon, 2002-05-06 at 14:09, Stephen Zander wrote: > > > >>>>> "Junichi" == Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp> writes: > > > Junichi> They don't upgrade properly. > > > "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it > > > means." > > Definitions: > > * By library upgrade I mean major library upgrade, one which > > changes the major number of the library rendering making it > > incompatible with current applications. > > I think this is an important issue, and I in my quick scan I haven't > > seen an email that really addresses this, so I will bite. > > Having multiple major versions of a shared library causes lots of > > problems. > > The initial problem is that the old library conflicts with the new > > library. > A new shared library package should *not* conflict with the old library > package, for exactly the reasons you describe. Shared libraries are > specifically designed to allow multiple soversions to be installed > simultaneously. The only real problem here, and the one I think Brian was alluding to, is that you can't have two versions of the same source package installed into a distribution at the same time; each major version of the library must have its own source package with a different name. This is really quite an insignificant problem, however: if you want Debian to provide two versions of the library, then there needs to be a maintainer for each of them. It is not sufficient to have a maintainer for only the new version of the library and allow the old library to coast unmaintained into a stable release. If there's no one willing to put forth the effort to coordinate the packages for liborbit0 and liborbit2 (for example) so that they can both be installed into the archive, then there's no point in complaining about a lack of good support for old versions; the problem at that point is not a lack of infrastructure, but a lack of maintainer interest. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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