major libgda and libgnomedb upgrade notice

[Michael A. Peters]

On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 09:27 -0500, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 11/28/05, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> > You can: Ship compat packages.
> 
> and then orphan them a week later?
> 
> Since there are no guidelines for how long someone is required to hold
> maintainership over a package in general... i think your insistence
> for this single case is misplaced. This is the price that is paid for
> having a rolling model without distinct releases.  It's inapporpriate
> to force a packager to maintain compat packages for a time period
> beyond what they feel comfortable maintaining securely on their own.
> It irrational to believe that all versions of all libraries can be
> maintained forever into the future.  Extras has never promised to be a
> static platform for development. At most Extras promises to be
> self-consistent.  Expecting an extras maintainer to make a general
> warning to this list and to use the tools like repoquery and
> repoclosure to pinpoint dependancies inside Extras are reasonable
> expectations. For their actions to be constrained by potential
> unknowable dependancies is unreasonable given the nature of the Extras
> rolling development model.

I think this is a valid point - since rpm installations will at least
warn the user, non rpm installations are not supported (and neither are
rpm installations from other repos)

It *would be nice* however.

This particular case probably doesn't matter that much since there
really isn't very much out that that can be broken.

But it *would be nice*

> 
> The only sane and fair way to impose what you want is not by
> harrassing individual maintainers, but by changing the Extras
> development model so that it has established point releases with
> specific requirements on maintainer actions at point release
> boundaries. And that's an argument you need to have with the steering
> committee.

My preference would be no library versioning at all unless absolutely
necessary (and with directfb apparently it was - as the spec file wasn't
building, which is a worse breakage imho)

But if extras isn't going to do that - if it really is needed - someone
willing to maintain could submit a compat spec file.