[ On Wednesday, October 17, 2001 at 03:29:54 (-0400), James Chacon wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: stdio FILE extension
>
> "to go from 1.5 -> 1.6 requires you to recompile everything in pkgsrc and
> you either have to learn the build system so you can prebuild before
> converting or lose all of /usr/pkg after upgrading before you rebuild..."
> 
> just does them a disservice.

Now you're just being silly.

What that group of users would really do is just re-install all the
pre-compiled binaries supplied on the 1.6 CD they upgrade from.

To make their lives easier all you need do is provide an additional
check-box in the sysinst process which will automatically upgrade all of
their packages for them.

The rest of the users might groan a bit, but they'd recompile and get on
with more important things.  Maybe some of them would join the ranks of
the first group.  Either way I think they'd be happier in the long run.

Remember too I (and kre, and I think greywolf, mcr, and others too) are
still only talking about breaking such backwards compatability with
MAJOR new releases, not minor ones.

I haven't defined what a major release must be, though I did go so far
as to suggest that with NetBSD it probably wouldn't hurt too much if it
were at the 1.x to 1.x+1 level.  1.x to 2.x is apparently a very long
time to wait for such a cleanup, and there's no telling if 2.x to 3.x
will be any better (though hopefully maybe it will).  Maybe it's only
1.x to 1.x+2 or something like that.

Certainly it should never be done where another minor release of the
previous major release is not also planned.

The bottom line is that libc major bumps really should be made a part of
the regular release process.  The very fact of becoming a regular part
of the process would make it easier for users to plan for, as well as
easier for the developers to plan for and to do on subsequent cycles.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>     <woods@robohack.ca>
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