[OpenIndiana-discuss] How many versions of libs/apps should OI provide?

[Peter Tribble]

[trimmed]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 12:22 AM, Jim Klimov <jim at cos.ru> wrote:

>
>  We had a sort of a discussion on IRC today, which ended up in a choice
> better made or at least discussed by community than by the back-alley
> dealers ;)
>
>  So, as software evolution marches on, some projects' newer releases bring
> new features, bugs and ABI/API incompatibilities that make them different
> from older releases - and sometimes not backwards compatible (most projects
> try to make updates easy for their consumers, some don't).
>
>  As a result, the distro, such as OI/Hipster (and especially Hipster,
> posing as bleeding-edge rolling-release), has to balance and make a choice
> between:
>
>  a) providing only the newest versions of libs/apps
>
>  b) also provide older releases at least partially
>
>  c) don't rush for newest releases - ain't broke don't fix;
>
>  All of these variants (and probably more can be thought of) have their
> valid pro's and contra's so it is not easy to pick one as an apparently
> best choice.
>

Also, the correct choice may vary depending on the package in question, as
they
vary in their approach to stability.

Some - gtk for example - are explicitly designed for major versions,
such as gtk2 and gtk3, to coexist.

Others have versions that you can overlap, such as libpng. In Tribblix I
ship a
compat package for libpng, that I can install for old packages that are
linked
against older versions. Anything new gets built against the current
version. I
use a similar approach for tiff. I originally needed to do this for the
transition
period of rebuilding everything I could, but the compat packages still exist
just in case.

So I favour keeping everything as current as you can, having compatibility
packages for older release of libraries at least.

I thoroughly dislike the "stable" approach of backporting patches to older
versions. In my experience this ends up being expensive to maintain compared
to just building current, ties you up in knots because other things require
newer
versions, and give you bigger and harder jumps (and more breakage) when you
finally do upgrade.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/