Policy on upgrading dependents

[Daniel J. Luke]

On May 21, 2011, at 10:21 PM, Blair Zajac wrote:
> 
> It's not that simple if the new version is not source compatible.  I think it's incumbent on the committer to check that dependant ports do compile and provide any necessary patches for those ports to compile.

I don't think I'd go quite that far. It's probably best if the committer can do this, but shouldn't be really responsible for ports that he/she doesn't maintain.

For something that is API stable (but ABI change), it's good policy to have the maintainer (for now) revbump dependent ports so they get rebuilt (which falls under our "if it's broken, you are free to do the minimum possible to fix it" policy).

For API changes, it usually makes sense to do some more coordination with the maintainer (and in some cases, we have to handle it by having both the old and new versions of the library around).

Having said that, it's great if a maintainer can supply patches/support for dependent ports if/when these sorts of things happen.

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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