Re: curl, testing and gcc-3.2 (?) (was Re: Debian curl package depends on gcc-3.2?)

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 02:56:21PM +0200, Bj?rn Stenberg wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > No, that's not what shlibdeps do either. See:
> > 
> >   http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html#s-sharedlibs-shlibdeps
> 
> Lovely, so it's simply the other way around (as Adam Conrad said
> already). Thanks.
> 
> However, it still means packages get bogus dependencies that keep them
> out of testing. Even if the package in question was already accepted
> in stable.

The dependencies aren't bogus (apart from the occasional mistake in a
library's shlibs files). The reason why a library's shlibs get changed
is that binaries built against one version of the library can't be
guaranteed to run correctly against older versions. Stable is irrelevant
here, because the package built for stable was built against an older
version of the library.

Binary dependencies are not the same as source dependencies.

> Let me be blunt and ask: Is this a "we don't care, go away" issue or
> why is this so difficult to discuss?

The only practical and correct way that I know of to improve the
situation would be to figure out some way to calculate package
dependencies from symbol versions in certain libraries. That's very
difficult and would probably involve a lot more work on the part of the
maintainers of those libraries even if it could be implemented, though.

I think it is much more productive to try to get infrastructure packages
into a good enough state that major upgrades can move into testing more
quickly: that is, fix real bugs! Mailing package maintainers asking them
to loosen their shared library dependencies is not useful and is
sometimes actively counterproductive (I've seen maintainers messing
around trying to upload packages built against testing, not realizing
that the autobuilders all build against unstable so this won't do any
good anyway, which increases the time their package has to wait over
what would have happened if they'd just left well alone).

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]