Re: make modular X11 the default on NetBSD

[Aleksey Cheusov <cheusov%tut.by@localhost>]

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 7:31 PM, Joerg Sonnenberger
<joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost> wrote:
> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 10:01:03AM -0400, Julio Merino wrote:
>> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:56 AM, David Holland
>> Another option would be to only rebuild a package if its full version
>> (including the revision) has changed.  Yes, I'm aware that this has
>> its own problems, but it also means that the maintainer controls
>> exactly what causes a package to be rebuilt and ensures that package
>> revisions are bumped to showcase differences in the binaries.

> It doesn't help for that purpose. In fact, it just increases the chance
> of getting broken binary packages by a significant factor.

This is actually how most other packaging systems work. The main task
of the packager,
besides packaging itself and bug fixing, is to detect changes in ABI/API and to
update buildlink3.mk accordingly and make a recursive version bump (in
term of pkgsrc)
if necessary like pkgsrc developers did for png-1.5.
Nobody rebuilds *all* packages that depend on libX11 just because
it was updated. Really!

It's true that rebuilding packages recurisvely makes them more *stable* because
we don't rely on human's mistakes. But there are a number of methods
to automatically
detect some kind of problems. In AltLinux, for example, (Russian Linux
distribution)
not only required and provided shared libraries are collected (like we do with
REQUIRES and PROVIDES) but all *symbols* required and provided by every
executable and shlibs in the package. Package manager (modified apt4rpm)
in turn makes additional consistency per-symbol checks. More over
before releases they manually
analyse (and fix) problems their automatically ran tools detect in the
repository.

Rebuilding all packages recursivelly, especially in quarter branches,
costs too much
taking into account limitations in the hardware.