On Sat, 9 Sep 2000, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > Such would tend to defeat the purpose of '>=' wildcards. For instance:
> > ethereal is known to build and run against glib-1.2.7, and it builds
> > and runs against glib-1.2.8. Hence the wildcard, glib>=1.2.7. This
> > serves pkgsrc users, and it serves binary package users who upgrade
> > fastidiously. (Assumming that the binary packages were posted with the
> > same care.) It only hurts people who upgrade carelessly, or who are
> > "victims" of casual package posters (guilty as charged).
> > 
> > As far as that goes, I like David's idea of fixing the @pkgdep's in
> > the binary packages.
> 
> "no".
> See your description above for the reason. There is no need to seperate
> between wildcard depends in pkgsrc and in binary packages. 

	There is a difference between 'can build against one of these
	versions' and 'can run against one of these versions', with the
	former being more forgiving against version skew than the latter.

	In particular a program may detect more recent features of both
	libraries and binaries and compile differently - resulting in an
	application which will not function against an earlier version
	of the package on which it depends.

	If we don't fixup the @pkgdep in binary packages we should make
	sure we store the compiled against version and give a warning
	if an earlier version is present at install time.

	I'm all with giving people as much rope as they can use, but
	its helpful if we warn them which bits are more likely to burn :)

                David/absolute
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