On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:55:52PM +0100, Adeodato Simó wrote: > The problem is, of course, defining the “well-defined policy”. For most > libraries an early removal has no big consequences. It would have been > tempting to have guessed that there wouldn’t be any for poppler either, > because the fact that decrufting poppler would render texlive uninstallable, > upon which a lot of packages build-depend on, needs a bit of close looking > in order to be noticed. IMHO the root cause here was that the poppler transition required source changes in the reverse dependencies (such as texlive-bin). Yet, the maintainers of poppler didn't care to warn maintainers of reverse dependecies nor the release team that this transition isn't solvable with just binNMU's. This lead to the transition to take so long that old poppler library got decrufted. Perhaps it should be assumed by default that soname transitions require source changes, _unless_ proven otherwise. And proving is really simple - just try recompiling all reverse dependencies against the new library.
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