sound distribution practices

[Alessandro Ghedini]

On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 10:13:37AM -0700, Allison Randal wrote:
> On 04/08/2012 10:01 AM, Alessandro Ghedini wrote:
> > 
> > The parrotapi-* thing would avoid an update of the parrot package, but there's
> > nothing that would avoid an update of, say, libdata-dumper-parrot, and it would
> > leave the system with an older version of parrot and a newer version of the
> > bytecode library, which, as Patrick pointed out, are not compatible. If the
> > library depends on parrotapi-* too, it is not updated until every other
> > parrotapi-* reverse dependencies are ready to be updated.
> 
> Then +1 to updating all the binary packages that contain compiled
> bytecode, with a Depends on parrotapi-*.

I think I don't understand... NQP and Rakudo *do* ship compiled bytecode, and
would of course need to be rebuilt when a new Parrot release is uploaded. The
whole point of parrotapi-* is to make sure that Parrot and its libraries are
not updated on the users systems (or migrate to testing) until the rebuild of
the compilers is done. This way we avoid that Parrot-based compilers don't break
in the period of time between the Parrot upload and the compilers rebuild (which
may be more or less long).

But the PBC libraries built from Parrot *do* break the compilers if they are
updated before the compilers themselves and the other Parrot packages, and that
is why they need to be "constrained" by the parrotapi-* mechanism too. Making
them depend on parrotapi-* is just one way, the other would be to make parrot
striclty depend (as in (= X.Y.Z)) on them.

Cheers

-- 
perl -E'$_=q;$/= @{[@_]};and s;\S+;<inidehG ordnasselA>;eg;say~~reverse'
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