On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> Given the way our "open-ended dependencies" work (or rather, don't
> work), I feel the only reasonable thing to do, when a shared library
> gets a minor version bump, is to bump the "nb" versions of all shared
> library packages that depend on that shared library, and then bump the
> dependencies of any packages that depend on *that* shared library (the
> one that depends on the other shared library). Then, at least, the
> latest version of everything is correct, and "pkg_add" from ftp will
> just work.
>
> Notice that gd-1.8.3 in pkgsrc already depends on png>=1.0.11, but not
> *every* gd-1.8.3 depends on png>=1.0.11, and especially not the one on
> the 1.5.2 CD's and on the ftp server. In other words, letting
> "buildlink" take care of all the dependencies is just wrong, because on
> the one hand, it's often overly aggressive in bumping dependencies that
> shouldn't be bumped, and on the other, it fails to update the version
> numbers of packages that have fundamental changes (by virtue of changes
> in the packages they depend on), without which no sane combination of
> dependencies is possible.

	If all packages used buildlinks for the dependencies it would
	be possible to set a 'library nb version offset' in packages
	that provided shared libraries. A package including a buildlink
	with such an offset would add it to their 'nb' version. Every time
	a library was updated in an incompatible fashion the offset would
	be incremented.

	Should handle all updates automatically, but would result in really
	quite ugly version numbers...

-- 
		David/absolute		-- www.netbsd.org: No hype required --