[83358] trunk/dports/net/fetch

[Anders F Björklund]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>>>> But using port: dependencies seem like a step back,
>>>> since it's losing dependency information (i.e. "5") ?
>>> 
>>> I'm not aware of this additional information ever having been helpful.
>>> 
>>> lib:- and bin:-style dependencies would allow a file (in this case libfetch.5.dylib) located outside the MacPorts prefix to satisfy the dependency. We don't want that, so you should almost always use port:- or path:-style dependencies.
>> 
>> Well, if you have a package depending on libfetch.5.dylib
>> and the package providing libfetch.5.dylib is upgraded to
>> libfetch.6.dylib the system is able to notice this and
>> complain about the missing dependency without a revupgrade.
> 
> I'm not aware of MacPorts having any code that does that.

No, but that doesn't stop the additional information from
being useful does it ? Anyway, rpm has such information.

>> If you don't have such version information in the dependencies,
>> you're at the mercy of detecting such linking errors at runtime
>> and upgrading the providing port.
> 
> If a port is upgraded and it introduces a new library version, it is the responsibility of that committer to revbump all ports that use the library so they get rebuilt.

Yeah, and this can take ages - as seen with the libpng port.
The end result is usually holding off with major updates...

--anders