On Sat, 2005-08-13 at 13:31 +0200, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote: > Hi, > > After I invested an hour so to track down the reason for an evil FTBFS, > I have a very simple request: If you maintain a library that gets used > by other people and you break the API, you should notify > them. Really. It makes life easier. For the usual C/C++ libraries its > not that complicated, as SONAME changes lead to new package names and > everything is fine. > But if you maintain something like a perl library, you should either the > change the fscking package name if you break the API or file a bug > against all packages that depend on your lib. > > And no, it's enough to write "NOTE: This release breaks API. Please see > Changes for further details." in your changelog. Unfortunately, its often up to the upstream whether this happens or not ... Certainly if one knows, being proactive about it is important. On a related note, should we consider defining a convention similar to soname for dynamic languages like perl/python etc? I.e. for a python library 'foo', install the code as 'foo1', and have a dummy package 'foo' which has a __init__.py containing 'from foo1 import *' ? This wouldn't deliver all the benefits of sonames - particularly it wouldn't automatically resolve to 'foo1' at runtime, but it would allow concurrent installs of foo1 and foo2. Cheers, Rob -- GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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