kdelibs: breaking the circular dependency

[Steve Langasek]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 09:16:53PM -0500, Christopher Martin wrote:
> Instead, the KDE team proposes to simply merge kdelibs-bin into kdelibs4c2a. 
> The general practice of separating libraries and programs makes no sense 
> for kdelibs, given the close two-way ties between the two. Multiple 
> versions of the KDE libraries can't be installed side-by-side.

Why not?  This is not a point to be glossed over, given that this is the
principal reason for the rule and a significant feature of Debian upgrades.
If kdelibs underwent an ABI change *not* caused by the compiler, why should
we not expect kdelibs to allow coinstallability like other library packages
do?

> And this close relationship means that KDE was never a good candidate for
> multiarch anyway (only one copy of kdelibs-bin means KDE applications of
> only one architecture),

Except that fixing the paths in kdelibs-bin to ensure co-installability of
packages implementing different interfaces would serve multiarch and partial
upgrades equally well...

> so mixing programs and libs in one package won't cost anyone anything, in
> practice. But since this change will stretch policy, which prefers that
> libraries and programs be split, we'd like the blessing of the Release
> Team before committing ourselves.

Sorry, the only blessing that the release team as release team has to offer
is "this doesn't suck so bad that we'll refuse to release it".  While I can
give you that blessing, for a real endorsement you should discuss this on
debian-devel where technical discussions belong.

> The removal of this circular dependency should, hopefully, make future 
> transitions easier, avoiding difficulties such as those encountered by 
> users during the Woody to Sarge upgrade. Post-Etch, KDE 4 will require a 
> kdelibs transition, and this will be tied to a move from Qt3 to Qt4. 
> Getting kdelibs' circular dependencies straightened out before Etch may 
> help later on.

Yes, that definitely sounds like a benefit.  If you're looking for an
optimal solution for upgrade support, though, I think we still need to
carefully consider the question of ABI co-installability.

Cheers,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/
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