Re: Coordinating upload of teTeX-3.0 to unstable
Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com> wrote:
>>a) libkpathsea: It has a new soname, and I have not checked at all
>> whether this causes problems in compiling other packages.
> This means libkpathsea3 will no longer be available in unstable, right?
At least if we don't generate it from a different source package, which
would be easy to do if there are some programs that cannot be ported.
> I have attempted to check whether this could cause any trouble in transitions
> to testing (by linking transitions together).
>
[...]
> So I think it's safe to upload after evince makes it to etch.
[...]
Okay, I'll keep that in mind.
>
> However, one other point: why is libkpathsea-dev being replaced with
> libkpathsea4-dev? Did the API change? If so, changing the name is correct,
> but the transition will involve serious work on the part of the maintainers
> of every depending package and they should be warned. If not, changing the
> name is a bad idea and causes unnecessary trouble.
I am not sure. Even upstream doesn't know whether the ABI has changed,
and didn't say anything about the API. There has never been a
description of the API, and the library was never intended to be used as
a dynamically loaded library, only for static linking, and originally
only for the web2c distribution, not for other programs.
It's just that many other projects do use it, and that Debian (and
probably many other distributions) created it as a shared library.
Upstream said that if we previously did that, we should carry on (and
they are about to rewrite it as libkpse with a proper design), and so we
do.
So the bottom line is that there'll be more work for the maintainers of
every depending package than just changing a line in the control file,
anyway; and I hope that if the package they build-depend on vanishes
this will be enough incentive for them to actually do this work.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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