[Pkg-e-devel] Comments regarding ecore_0.9.9.050+svn20081201-1_i386.changes

Frank Lichtenheld djpig at debian.org
Sun Jan 4 20:53:22 UTC 2009


On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 09:27:57PM +0100, Albin Tonnerre wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 07:45:36PM +0000, Frank Lichtenheld wrote :
> > Are these -dev package names (e.g. libecore-0.9.9.050a-dev)
> > really necessary? I mean I can se it for the lib package, but
> > why the -dev package, too? Do you plan to have multiple
> > versions of them in the archive simultaniously? Otherwise
> > versioned build-depends are usually enough.
> 
> Future API (or ABI) breakages are expected (the same applies to evas, edje
> and edbus), and upstream is not really fond of SONAME changes, so we
> choose to rename the -dev packages to avoid breakages when that happens.
> If you have any suggestion regarding how to handle this kind of situation more
> gracefully, I'm interested, though.

I would suggest not encoding the version in the -dev package name,
since that will force you to add a lot of conflicts relations over
time.

It is often acceptable to break the API with new versions of
a -dev package, since building the reverse dependencies is then
broken anyway, while it is not acceptable to break the ABI without
package name changes since that might break installed systems on
update. Using different -dev package names is only useful to make
smooth transitions from one API to another which is probably not
intended here.

Gruesse,
-- 
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig at debian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/



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