Re: HEADS UP: I will be merging christos-time_t by the end of the week

[David Holland <dholland-current%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 09:10:21PM -0600, Eric Haszlakiewicz wrote:
 > Does this mean that, as pkgsrc currently stands, a package built against
 > the new system (w/ 64-bit time_t) will use a package built against an old
 >  system but fail at runtime?  yuck.

Not if we do the mass revbump.

A process image that's all old stuff (old executable and old libs)
will work fine. A process image that's all new stuff (new executable
and new libs) will also work fine. If you mix old and new stuff in the
same process, e.g. if you recompile a program but not its libs, or
recompile some libs but not every program that uses them, it may blow
up at runtime.

The mass revbump insures that newly compiled stuff will be all new.
There's no better or less drastic way to do it, because there's no way
to encode the necessary dependence information in ELF program images.

 > If so, it sounds like it would be nice to have an explicit dependency on
 > something like libc, so we don't need to bump every other dependent package.
 > (but then we'd need an implied dependency on the old libc if one isn't 
 >  explicitly specified?  hmm...)

You still need to bump everything when there's an ABI change. The only
way around it is to replace ELF with something less broken.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost