On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 10:56 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le mercredi 20 février 2008 à 10:41 +0100, Ralf Corsepius a écrit :
> 2. It's technically counterproductive.
> compat packages are band aids to help out in cases where "upgrading"
> isn't easily applicable. Banning compat-*-devel packages voids this
> aspect.
I've seem people proposing the creation of foo123 packages just to get
around the "no devel for compat packages" rule proposed there.
Right,
it's the escape to get around a silly proposal.
Don't
tell me this is progress — those foo123 packages are going to stick a
lot longer that compat packages would ever had.
They tend to stick longer, because
they tend to be designed for parallel
installation, often because of technical needs.
compat-<package> (without devel) tend to be introduced as temporary,
legacy band-aid run-time packages.
So the "no devel" rule is nothing but hiding problems under
the carpet.
No. It's closing the eyes in front of actual problems.
It does not make people less inclined to build against old versions,
you
just have bandaids that do not look like bandaids anymore.
You seem to be missing
that it's almost always not a matter of will, but
a matter of technical requirement to ship compat*/foo123 packages, to
keep things going at all.
Or more abstract: Development is not a linear process, it has branches,
curves and edges. Banning *devel packages from "compat" packages is
trying to linearize development with a sledgehammer.
Ralf