[haiku-development] Re: Package Management - application bundle policy
- From: Oliver Tappe <zooey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 17:04:04 +0100
On 2011-01-11 at 16:36:27 [+0100], Brecht Machiels <brecht@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:28:36 +0100, Mark Watts <miraiwarren@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
> > Just a question really: if the package maintainer/developer knows the
> > needed version of library dependencies then can't they just specify a
> > single
> > version (e.g. depend == media-sound/amarok-2.3.2-r1) rather than a range
> > (e.g. depend >= media-sound/amarok-2.3.2-r1)? Wouldn't that provide the
> > desired stability as long as the package manager has no arbitrary limits
> > on what older versions are available?
>
> Newer library versions might fix important security problems. So you'd
> want to upgrade.
>
> Now that I think of it, libraries can sometimes be built with different
> options (Unicode support in Python comes to mind, for example). These
> options will need to be specified for the dependency.
>
> Maybe it would be good to specify dependencies not in terms of versions
> but simply as a hash of the package to uniquely identify them? But then
> you can no longer say an application needs at least version ...
One way this can be solved (openSUSE does it this way) is to let each
package declare a set of 'provides' and then declare the dependencies on
those instead of the package as such.
So the python package could for instance provide 'python-2.6' &
'python-with-unicode'. However, if there would be a python package without
unicode support, both packages would have to be named differently anyway.
But declaring 'provides' explicitly is much more robust if the options of a
package may change over time.
cheers,
Oliver
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