On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 09:32:37PM -0500, Chris Cheney arranged a set of bits into the following: > Today I was reminded of something that causes apps not to migrate into > sarge. When maintainers remove old libraries from the archive! Today > for example libexif8 was removed by Christophe Barbe and replaced by > libexif9. Guess what that does... any package which depends on libexif8 > now becomes... you guessed it... UNINSTALLABLE! Why does this annoy me > in particular, because I just uploaded kdegraphics yesterday which was > built against libexif8. Guess how many hours it takes for the m68k > buildd to rebuild kdegraphics..... OVER 38 HOURS! > > IMHO we need to make an addition to policy stating that an old lib can > not be removed from the archive until no other packages still depend on > it. How about old libraries can not be removed until either no packages depend on it OR the author files RC bugs with any dependent pakcages (and hopefully waits for at least a day in case of any major problems)? This way ancient libraries can go, and the maintainers of packages depending on these libraries don't have to constantly keep an eye on bugs for ftp.d.o. The only downside would be filing all the bugs, and this might be a good way to dissuade people from removing libraries that are widely used.
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