[csw-maintainers] Upgrading shared libraries

[Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski]

I'm splitting this thread, to talk a bit more about library updates.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:43 PM,  <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Hi Maciej,
>
>> On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:25 PM,  <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
>>> You can either put the original legacy libraries in there "manually"
>>> during post-install (see curl for an example) or use version modulations
>>> to also build the old version and put only the libs in the package
>>> (see expat/flac/neon/readline for examples).
>>
>> I see, version modulations. Is it a one-way process only? I mean, this
>> way the list of package versions is going to be growing indefinitely,
>> unless there's a process in place to phase out the old versions.
>
> No. After the updated package has been released you file the bugs
> to the packages depending on the old libs :-) After the last one has
> been updated you remove them from your package.

I'll drill the topic some more. What if a dependent package becomes
orphaned? Suppose there's CSWlibfoo, which has been updated, but
package CSWbar depends on it, the maintainer vanished inside a black
hole and nobody is willing to pick the package up. Are there any
deadlines? Does the importance of CSWbar matter?

Ideally, I'd like it to be there a page which describes how to deal
with library updates, along with the process of phasing out old
library versions. Can one of the elders write it? If not, I'm going to
do it myself, and Trygve is going to start telling me why what I wrote
is wrong... ;-)

Maciej