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Re: GNOME 1 ABI involving libpng



J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) writes:

 > I'm afraid I don't follow you. My patch does nothing more than
 > introducing an alternative packaging of libpng2's development
 > files, which allows building libpng2-dependent packages on systems
 > that need to have libpng3-dev installed as well.

That sounds quite reasonable.  The first rule for introducing
something new like Gnome2 into a mature distro like Debian should be
the same rule that physicians follow: do no harm.

>From my personal experience leading the upgrade from SAX1 to SAX2, I
know that's not easy: many of the compromises we had to make were
technically inelegant (or even ugly), and I was often tempted just to
break backwards-compatibility and ask everyone to upgrade their apps.
Fortunately, I received and listened to sane advice, and as a result,
SAX is still widely used (and under a different maintainer to boot).

It's OK to make mistakes -- if you don't take some risks, you can
never make any progress.  It's also OK, though, to admit mistakes.
Debian has experimented one one upgrade path for Gnome2/GTK2/png3 and
it didn't work; it's time to try something different.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson, david@megginson.com, http://www.megginson.com/



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