Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum AT orgis.org>]

Am Thu, 24 Oct 2013 18:16:36 -0500
schrieb Robin Cook <rcook AT wyrms.net>: 

> Just curious.  Why is there a need to keep the older libraries? 

The idea is to plan for big ugly incompatible changes, introducing new
major version and possibly still taking care of the old version for a
while, giving applications time to switch to the new API, which is
supposedly so radically re-thought that this process has to take years.

Let me give an example ... 

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-sound/+bug/1208204

Apart from the hideous complexity of volume control, this is an example
of gtk multiple versions of a rather popular library still being
around, namely Gtk+. I must confess, I don't have version 3 installed
on by box yet. Even the Ardour 3 spell I submitted recently builds upon
Gtk+2.

Of course, I wouldn't have trouble writing the spell to weed out
binaries if upstream would distribute library and utilities in separate
packages. Upstream is right though in stating the usual practice of all
distributions that matter, hacking up the installed files in $DESTDIR
into separate packages.

Well, and concering the ugly API changes and differing version number:
My opinion indeed is to simply do not do that. If you want to change
things radically, do a different library. And make sure that anything
the package installs does not conflict with the old one.


Alrighty then,

Thomas

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