Re: Bug#154714: not declared dependency on libvorbisfile

[Daniel Kobras <kobras@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 02:02:44PM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 08:50:34PM +0200, Daniel Kobras wrote:
> > We can make sure that no other packages are affected, but still the
> > change might break home-brew software.  Do we care?
> 
> If people care about this, they should get it right in their packages to
> begin with, by use versioned symbols in their libraries -- and not make
> dozens of other maintainers dance to rebuild their packages after the
> real damage has already been done.  Wasting developer resources in order
> to provide a smooth upgrade path for hypothetical third-party software
> is NOT in the best interest of our users.

The people that care are rarely in a position to 'get it right'.  The
people that care are end-users mostly, I'd guess.  But really, that's
not the point anyway.  As it stands, the majority of libs in our archive
doesn't use versioned symbols, so usually we'll end up with a problem
when the soname of a lib changes, and another lib depends on this one.
Several solutions have been proposed, causing differing amounts of work
among developers, both Debian and upstream.  The question is when to
simply ignore the problem:

a) never,
b) when no Debian package is affected,
c) up to maintainer's discretion?

Currently, we're following c).  Both options a) and b) I can live with,
but I'd like to see consent among maintainers--this issue occurs often
enough.

Regards,

Daniel.


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