unity-dev team mailing list archive

[Didier Roche <didrocks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 04/01/2013 20:38, Ted Gould a écrit :
> On Fri, 2013-01-04 at 10:52 +0100, Didier Roche wrote:
> > - Nux broke its API and ABI and the build-dependency requirement 
> > wasn't bumped on unity
> > - Compiz broke its API and ABI and the build-dependency requirement 
> > wasn't bumped on unity
> >
> > Please, for the 2 laters, please bump the requirement on the 
> > depending package once you break the API. This is extremely important 
> > (and not the first time I have to do it myself) whereas quite easy to 
> > do in debian/control as you can see in the attached merge request:
> > https://code.launchpad.net/~didrocks/unity/fix-ftbfs-2013/+merge/141876 
> > <https://code.launchpad.net/%7Edidrocks/unity/fix-ftbfs-2013/+merge/141876>
>
> This is actually impossible to do.  You were only able to do that 
> because you knew the revisions where the API changes were going to 
> land in.  But, since usually the Unity patch and the Nux patch are 
> developed in parallel, and which daily they'll land in are not 
> determinate (perhaps autolanding would fail) it's impossible to know 
> the version before landing, and especially when reviewing branches.
>
> We discussed this at UDS.  You told me it would hardly happen so 
> wasn't worth considering.  I don't think you can ask people to now 
> handle this in their development.  This is something you'll have to 
> continue to fix by hand when it happens as there's no way to know 
> enough information at development time.

Ted, as part of the discussion at UDS, we told that it would just need 
to be previous release day +1, which is the day listed in 
debian/changelog and that everyone is aware about just looking at that 
file. Even if the day is not the day when it will be released, it will 
suffice in the sense it will build-dep on the right version.

Also, that we have to do that because there is a bad history of 
committing to ABI and API stability, remember that normally, in every 
normal upstream project, such a breakage ask to change the soname, and 
in this case, we will know beforehand on which version of the -dev 
package to build-dep. We are just workarounding here bad upstream practice.

Cheers,
Didier