Re: renaming a package
Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 04:34:54PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > We should make versioned -dev (binary) packages the exception, not
> > the norm. libglut-dev is better. Think about libglut3-dev,
> > libglut4-dev, libglut5-dev etc. and how libglut-dev makes upgrades
> > much easier.
>
> Except that this means the old source packages can't stay around in the
> archive, since libglut-dev is generated by both old and new.
>
> This makes transitions more difficult: libglut3 and libglut4 could
> still coexist on users' systems, but they could not both be in a
> distribution at the same time.
AFAIK, katie supports that several packages generate the same binary
package and the new one takes precedence; but even if this feature has
been disabled, we can always repackage the old library so that it only
generates the old library package, not the -dev one.
By providing a single -dev package on each given distribution, we
avoid the user the need to investigate about which one is the "good" one
to be used. I think this is good and desirable for most libraries.
Oohara Yuuma wrote:
> 1. libfoo1 is compiled with libglut3 (that is, libglut-dev)
> 2. bar is compiled with libfoo1
> 3. libfoo1 is recompiled with libglut4 (that is, again, libglut-dev)
> 4. old bar does not work with new libfoo1
> 5. the maintainer of libfoo1 gets flamed because he/she is careless
> when using libglut-dev, though there is no good[1] way to specify
> a build-dependency to avoid this flame before libglut4 is released
> (that is, without knowing the version number of libglut-dev for libglut4)
Nobody should be flamed for not having a crystal ball...
Build-Depends: libfoo-dev (>= whatever) could be used here if needed
(I mean, if a package has to be reuploaded using a versioned build-depends).
Yes, this may happen. I never said a single -dev should be always better.
There will be libraries for which a single -dev is a good idea and
others for which it's not. Of course, libraries which do not keep
enough backwards source-compatiblity across different releases are the
typical case where a single -dev package does not help very much.
But those libraries should be the exception too, not the norm.
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