On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 12:53:12PM +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
On Sunday 2012-09-30 00:14, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
Exactly. A system without libjpeg.so.62 often is not considered "working stuff".
You know that there are other sources of software than the OBS? There's even such a thing as proprietary software.
You know that distros generally did not, and do not, bother with keeping old stuff around?
Yeah, like gcc33 and libstdc++33 which is also in Factory, libpng12, libpng14,...
You are citing a specific class of packages. libnl-1_1 also falls into that pool, for example.
But the reason we still have libpng12, libnl-1_1, etc. is not because some random proprietary program could possibly be linking against it, but because some software, in *source form*, still depends on it for compilation.
Yes, you can turn on libjpeg.so.62 generation in jpeg-turbo; ncurses does something similar (producing both libncurses.so.5 and libncurses.so.6), but then again, it does not do that for for proprietary programs _either_. Like with libnl-1_1->libnl3, there was a bigger API change in ncurses5->ncurses6.
And it makes a difference if a closed source software needs a library compared to an open source software? Try to see it from the users side. The only goal they have is to get something working. If we're aware of a software requireing a particular library version and it's easy to offer and maintain such a build we should do it. Anything else is going into the dogmatic direction. Cheers, Lars -- Lars Müller [ˈlaː(r)z ˈmʏlɐ] Samba Team + SUSE Labs SUSE Linux, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany