Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> Granted, if we do the version numbers right, it forces people to
> update lots of packages, but doing it as we have been doing it,
> haphazardly, is worse, as it makes people have to update all of them.

  There is one thing that would ease up things a lot: in-place package
updates.  As Jason suggested earler, what we'd need to have is some sort
of 'pkg_update' or 'pkg_add -u' that keeps older versions of shared
libraries.  This way, a user could update a package like 'png' without
deinstalling and reinstalling a bunch of dependent packages.

  This doesn't alleviate the burden for us developers of uploading a
consistent set of binaries onto the ftp server (well, we could upload
some 'hybrid' packages like a png-1.0.11 that also contains
library.so.<previousversion>, but I'd consider this a last resort). 
However, it would make it a lot easier for the average user to update
packages in place without having to worry about shared library linking.

  Cheers
      ,
   Rene