mechanism to retain system library versions

[Stanislav Ochotnicky]

Quoting Neal Becker (2013-12-18 14:06:23)
> During the past few months, I've switched from building my software against a 
> bundled version of boost libraries, to building against the system boost libs.
> 
> On updating to f20, all of my software became broken, because the library 
> versions it was linked with were removed.
> 
> So I had to race to rebuild all my software, and hope nothing broke when 
> rebuilt.
> 
> I think this situation is unfortunate.  We do have library versioning, so 
> different versions could coexist.
> 
> How do others solve this problem, or can anyone think of a solution?

So what would you have us (Fedora maintainers) do? Keep a separate version of
library for each API version? How many versions? Which libraries? When do we
clean up old versions? How do we clean them up?

If you package your software in RPM you will get errors about missing requires
immediately during update. If you don't ... well you are not following best
practices for software management for your platform so all bets are off.

It would be possible to write a tool that would check library versions in some
repos and scan current system for binaries that would be broken by updating to
that repo. With my Fedora hat on, I personally don't care much about software
that is not packaged (at least in RPM if not Fedora)

-- 
Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Developer Experience

PGP: 7B087241
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com