Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 23:09:12 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Simon Marlow <simonm@smarlow.com> Cc: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>, arch@freebsd.org, Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> Subject: Re: Cleaning old packages (was: Package system flaws?) Message-ID: <20020709210911.GA248@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <m0ptxw3bog.fsf@sm.dnsalias.com> References: <20020709161953.GA69779@lpt.ens.fr> <XFMail.20020709124717.jhb@FreeBSD.org> <20020709171417.GA69932@lpt.ens.fr> <m0ptxw3bog.fsf@sm.dnsalias.com>
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Simon Marlow said on Jul 9, 2002 at 21:10:07:
> Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> writes:
>
> > That seems rather ambitious, and too drastic a change, to me. What
> > I'd like to see is probably more like, the gfoo port needs gtk+ 1.2.6
> > or above, but not gtk+ 2.0 and above (incompatible) and not gtk+ 1.2.5
> > or below (buggy). There should be some way to specify this in the
> > makefile of the port, so that any port-management program like
> > portupgrade can make use of the information.
>
> A port can't know which versions of a library it will be compatible
> with ahead of time. Only the port itself knows which older versions
> of itself are compatible with the current version, so the information
> about whether an upgrade is safe or not should reside in the port
> which is being upgraded.
OK, these are two different problems I think. My problem is, is it
*necessary* to upgrade the gtk+ port (from the point of view of gfoo);
and your problem is, is it *safe* to do so. In principle, any of the
four possibilities could exist; to take libpng as an example:
neither safe nor necessary (this was true of a very large number of
ports which depended on libpng, during the 1.0 -> 1.2 transition)
safe but not necessary (usually, upgrading through minor versions,
like libpng 1.2.2 -> 1.2.3)
necessary but not safe (a port which depends on libpng 1.2.x and won't
work with libpng 1.0.x)
both safe and necessary (a bugfix in the earlier version which doesn't
affect compatibility otherwise)
So I think both the port, and the dependency, should carry some sort
of versioning information. The port should say which versions of the
dependency it's compatible with, and the dependency should say which
earlier versions are safe to upgrade from.
- Rahul
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