Re: Updating xloadimage to libtiff5

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On 2013-09-30 16:29, Dominik George wrote:
> Hi Niels,
> 
>> Now, I am not sure tiff counts as your "average transition".  Since it
>> involves two source packages instead of just one.  If your (patched)
>> package can be build against either the new or the old version of
>> libtiff, then I suspect an upload is not a problem at this time.
> 
> That means, I should Build-Depend on neither libtiff4-dev or
> libtiff5-dev, but libtiff-dev, and patch hthe code so it builds with
> either? Or is it ok to have the code build only against libtiff5-dev,
> and depend on that one explicitly?
> 
> -nik
> 

Let me clarify, "build against either" here being the source code can
compile against either (not having Build-Depends that allow either).

> another DD now explained to me that problems may arise with library
> packages that have reverse dependencies, because those might break when
> I rebuild against libtiff5. However, as xloadimage is a leaf package,
> except for electricsheep, which most likely does not use xloadimage as a
> dynamic object, I was told that the change might not be critical.

electricsheep does not appear to link against libtiff either. :)

I think three is one final argument that you have omitted for this to
make sense.  That is, xloadimage should not have any dependencies which
are linked against libtiff (otherwise, you could have xloadimage linked
against libtiff5 and $dependency linked against libtiff4 => "$fun").

That said, I'll leave it to more experienced members to review the
situation and give you the actual "ack" or "nack".

~Niels