Re: pkgin, version numbers and upgrade policy

[Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 11:16:25AM +0200, Havard Eidnes wrote:
> I've noticed that we have a more or less common routine that when
> significant changes are made to a package, so-called "recursive
> PKGREVISION bumps" are done.  If I understand correctly, this is
> primarily done so that users of binary packages will notice that
> there's a need to also update dependent packages, and to trigger
> an upgrade, typically via pkgin.

The point mostly is that we want to have different names for binary
packages that have different contents.

The most common cause for recursive bumps is libraries changing their
major version number.

To stay with your openssl example, if it the openssl update bumped the
libssl version from 10 to 11 and you don't bump gnupg's PKGREVISION,
you don't know if the binary package was built against the old openssl
(and depends on libssl.so.10) or the new one (and depends on
libssl.so.11).

The case with boost you mention was a bug. Bugs happen, but we try to
fix them when we find out.
 Thomas