Quoting Marcus Better <marcus@better.se>:
manfred@mosabuam.com wrote:As far as I can tell the problem exists because many libraries do dramatic changes to their API quite regularly ..Major API changes may warrant having two different versions of a library in Debian. This happens from time to time. However if such changes happen very often it is a sign of an immature or badly designed library that perhaps shouldn't be in Debian in the first place.
Hm... this might be the case. Or it might just mean that the project is very dynamic. How are you going to decide when too many changes are too many? How can you tell if the API changes affect the quality. Wouldn't it just be easier to use the same version as upstream so that you do not create additional work in terms of packaging, QA and so on as well as complexities for debugging. Wouldnt we also cause problems for upstream doing that since they might get bug reports from it.
I think it would be better to just leave the version as is and accept that multiple version sit around on the file system. They don' cause any harm anyway.
manfred