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http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13915





------- Additional Comments From iuso AT sourcemage.org  2007-08-01 08:01 -------
I realize that library changes such as this happen often, and that regular, 
full system updates are the preferred way to go. It's just Good Practice. And 
adding UP_TRIGGERS for all similar cases does seem like overkill because of 
the time and energy we'd need to spend on it.

But I can't shake off the nagging feeling that this kind of behavior isn't 
something a user should expect. What I did was divide a huge (~100 spells) 
update queue into smaller parts because I didn't want to check and answer all 
those queries in one go (and neither did I want to leave a potentially 
overheating laptop compiling overnight). Alas, gnupg-exp failed because 
libassuan and libksba weren't in the queue, and many other spells failed as a 
consequence. I had to do some detective work to find out what originally went 
wrong.

You're right in that it's difficult to write UP_TRIGGERS; the whole concept 
is 
most suitable for more important issues. And although versioned spells is a 
nice idea, it would take an ever larger amount of work to implement and 
maintain. Past discussion about it has reached the consensus that it's not 
going to happen, and I agree.

Then there's always the option of writing a version comparison function. It 
would be cool to be able to do 'depends libfoo min=1.0.2', and cast would 
pull 
in the latest libfoo if the installed one is < 1.0.2, and we wouldn't need to 
maintain separate versions of the same spell. But there is no globally 
accepted practice for versioning software releases. A function for comparing 
versions would need to be damn smart, and most people will say that it's 
impossible.

We used to have the UPDATED variable in DEPENDS, but that became redundant 
and 
was unrelated to this issue anyway. We could, however, implement something 
else to solve this problem. If each spell had its own REVISION variable for 
counting program version updates, we could easily track when a dependency is 
sufficiently up to date.

If libfoo 1.0.1's REVISION is 13, then REVISION will be bumped to 14 when 
libfoo is updated to 1.0.2. Then another spell can depend on libfoo >= 1.0.2 
by having 'depends libfoo min=14' in DEPENDS.

Just thinking out loud...

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