On Sun, 19 May 2002, Alan Barrett wrote:

> I quite often have to do this sort of thing.  For example, today I
> wanted to rebuild print/magicfilter, which gratuitously wants the latest
> graphics/netpbm, rather than being satisfied with the older netpbm
> that I already had installed. graphics/netpbm in turn wants the latest
> graphics/png, but I don't know whether this is gratuitous or really
> required.  Very many other things depend on the png package, and I
> really don't want to rebuild all of them, so I'll probably make netpbm
> depend on png>=1, and hope that the dependency on the png>=1.2.1 was
> not really necessary.

Lots of luck. Just for fun, do a "make package" in netpbm, save the
package, and see what happens when you reinstall that after updating
"png".

The thing about going through all of the hundreds of packages that
depend on "png" to see exactly which version is minimally needed, is
that, in the long run, it would benefit nobody. We only support having
one version of "png" installed, so eventually, as you upgrade
packages, you'd get to one package that requires the latest version,
and then you'd have to rebuild all the packages you'd already built.

On the netpbm bump in magicfilter, that was a mistake, though, as
magicfilter simply exec()'s the netpbm binaries, and doesn't link
against "libpng", so it's clearly forward and and backwards compatible
with any version of netpbm. I've just reverted that. If you see any
more like that, please let me know.

Frederick