Re: testing, unstable, and dependencies
On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 12:29:24PM +0100, "Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org> was heard to say:
> > On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 12:13:12PM +0100, guenter geiger wrote:
> >
> > > Not really. It is not only debhelper that creates the problems. If I
> > > have a package that build depends on libfoo3-dev for example, but it
> > > is known to build with libfoo2-dev as well (the configure script in
> > > most software detects this and acts accordingly).
> >
> > Ok, fair. How do you propose to handle that?
>
> I suggest -d.
>
> If an incompatible libpng2-dev and libpng3-dev exist, it's because the
> libraries do not have compatible ABIs, and it's important to ensure that
> you build against the proper one. (particularly when building a library
> linked against libpng, or a program linked against a library linked
> against libpng)
Why is it important to link against libnpg3 ? Lets assume that libpng2
is reasonable bugfree, and the application implements both, handling
version 2 and version 3, then you might loose some features by not
using version 3, but still, you will be able to compile it, and it will
run on a system with version 2.
Of course all of this is not easy, I am not claiming that I know a
solution or that there exists a general solution.
I am just saying that some software is pretty flexible regarding
build dependencies, actually the upstream developers might have put
a certain amount of work into this, there should be a way to reflect this,
and take advantage of that.
Guenter
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