Selective upgrading of packages

Posted Jul 17, 2012 10:57 UTC (Tue) by pkern (subscriber, #32883)
In reply to: Selective upgrading of packages by drag
Parent article: Left by Rawhide

The problem you run into is that the way Debian does dependencies is that when they upgrade some lower-level package they re-compile everything then have the new packages depend on the new lower-level package. This is probably not necessary as long as the developers of the low level packages are not huge dicks about breaking ABIs, but it does avoid the need for Debian to care when libraries don't bother to stay compatible with themselves.

That's pretty uncommon, especially now that we have symbol files at least for C libraries. The "recompile everything" normally only happens when the ABI is broken, which causes the binary package name to change. As we're pretty anal about ABIs it's not uncommon that we point upstream to breakage.

It is true, however, that some library say that if you compile against it, you need at least that same version of the library to use it. That's one way one can take without symbol files. This means that you do not need to manually check for ABI additions. But we don't do mass rebuilds for those new versions, it's just that packages happen to link against them when they are built and then inherit those dependencies.