On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 12:33:33PM +0100, Richard Jones wrote:
> I've been wondering about the use of '>=' deps. Surely these are
> actually wrong, since OCaml libraries require exact versions of all
> the libraries they were built with?
The problem is there is no strict relation between version and binary
compatibility. Versions could change keeping binary compatibility (if no
.cmi changes) or breaking it. In other words, we need to express at the
version number level a dependency which is not at that level;
unfortunately we can't express in debian/control something like "depends
on the version of foo such that the .cmi checksum is blablabla".
In the past we used to have more strict dependencies (not only >=, but
also << on the next version). That solution avoid problems like this
one, but used to make more problematic migration of packages to testing
and requires manual changes to debian/control even if next version of a
library does not havy binary compatibility issues.
The current solutions is a bit more lightweight but requires packages
maintainer to be careful avoiding transient, and broken, solutions to
enter testing. I'm not sure the current solution is better than the
previous one, nor the contrary.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-
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