Re: [Fink-devel] foo-bin (con.)

[David R. M. <dr...@cg...>]

> > Under your system, let's say I introduce foo-3.0.0 which is not 
> > backwards
> > compatible. Now all of the other developers need to revise their 
> > packages
> > immediately, because their packages were saying
> >   Depends: foo (>= 2.0.0)
> > but now they need to say
> >   Depends: foo (>= 2.0.0 << 3.0.0)
> > See the problem?
> 
> I was proposing that the second one be required in our packaging policy, 
> or implemented by fink (Maybe 'Depends foo (== MAJOR)'?)  Then all 
> packages that use the new system would have that to start with the lower 
> one.

Hmmm.  We can't ask people to put "Depends: foo (>= 2.0.0 << 3.0.0)"
in advance, because it is impossible to predict when the upstream authors
will change the major version number or what their versioning scheme
will be.  (To use a recent example: gnumeric was working on 0.x versions
then went from 0.98 to 0.99.0 to 1.0 0, but they major version number
never changed.)

I agree that many things could be accomplished by revising fink itself,
but my goal is to get this shared library stuff implemented with
minimal changes to fink.  (We will need two sets of changes eventually,
to implement the "splitoff" idea, and to implement dpkg's built-in
shlibs-handling facility, but I'm trying to keep the changes small.)

  -- Dave