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

[Albin Tonnerre]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 09:53:22PM +0100, Frank Lichtenheld wrote :
> 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.
>

They Provides: and Conflicts: libfoo-dev, so the number of conflicts shouldn't
have increased over time. However ...

> It is often acceptable to break the API with new versions of
> a -dev package

... Fair enough, I'll revert back to using libfoo-dev (>= $version) then.

> , 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.
> 

Indeed, it's not

Thanks,
-- 
Albin Tonnerre
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