This one time, at band camp, Dan Christensen said: > James Troup <james@nocrew.org> writes: > > Filippo Giunchedi <filippo@esaurito.net> writes: > > > Sorry but I can't really understand, writing a debian/shlibs.local > > > file overriding libc6 version is possible and supposed to work. Is > > > it wrong or bad pratice? I know it isn't the Right Way, I'm only > > > trying to understand what I'm probably missing. > > Sorry but it's stupid. If you don't do it for every architecture, > > it doesn't get you anywhere. If you're going to do it for every > > architecture, you have to have tested it. Can/would you really > > check it on all 11 architectures? > How is this different from all the other dependencies in Debian? A > package can stop working when some package it depends on changes. If > this happens without the maintainer noticing, a bug gets filed and the > problem gets fixed. <snip> > It's really quite a pain to have these versioned dependencies, so > that's why I'm asking for a more complete justification. This is known as ABI incompatibility, and this is precisely the problem here. The OP was asking why, since his program doesn't depend on any of the new function in libc6 2.3.x, can't he force the Depends: field to get it to migrate into testing. The answer is that his application was _compiled_ with libc6 2.3.x, and so the binary depends on the presence of that version of that library, even though the source could just as happily have been compiled against an older version. Nothing is stopping him (or you, or anyone else) from recompilng the source against the Woody or Sarge version, and making it avaiable somewhere. Doing that for one or two architectures is certainly doable, and if you're on a mission, it might even be doable for all 11, but it becomes more headache than it's worth after a while. This is, after all, one of the reasons distributions like Debian provide source code, and one of the many reasons Debian works so hard to make it easy to rebuild a binary package from source. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Stephen Gran | "Money is the root of all money." -- | | steve@lobefin.net | the moving finger | | http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Attachment:
pgp71FVTx_PDU.pgp
Description: PGP signature