[Pkg-telepathy-maintainers] API virtual package

[Simon McVittie]

On 25/09/14 05:00, Diane Trout wrote:
> I was trying to try the next version kde-telepathy and ran into a problem. It 
> looks like the current version of telepathy-qt is built against telepathy spec 
> 0.27.3, and it looks like the glib version in unstable is 0.24.1.

telepathy-glib and telepathy-spec versions are not synchronized. They
probably should have been, but they aren't.

As it happens, telepathy-glib 0.24.1 also contain code generated from
exactly spec 0.27.3 (look in spec/all.xml in its source).

However, whether this was the case or not, it would be OK for
telepathy-qt and telepathy-glib to not match exactly, because the
Telepathy spec has been fully backwards-compatible for a long time (at
least 5 years, which is as far back as telepathy-glib's NEWS goes), and
we have been careful to ensure that telepathy-glib's and telepathy-qt's
API and ABI remain backwards-compatible when upgraded to newer
compatible spec versions.

> Maybe there could be something similar for telepathy so we can keep all the 
> versions talking the same spec?

"Telepathy 0" is all backwards-compatible (back to 0.12 or something,
which was more than 5 years ago).

"Telepathy 1" (the 0.99.x snapshots) is not backwards-compatible, and is
also not ready yet (and it doesn't look as though it's going to be any
time soon). It is designed to be fully parallel-installable with
"Telepathy 0".

Debian 8 should only contain "Telepathy 0" components.

(Vague analogy: if Telepathy 0 is like Qt 3, then Telepathy 1 is like Qt 4.)

You only need API virtual packages like phpapi-* when your upstream
expects you to rebuild everything at semi-regular intervals, which is
not the case for Telepathy.

    S