On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Xavier HUMBERT wrote:

> I have another machine nto upgrade graphics/png, so I'll give another
> try, and try to keep the log.

You don't need to rebuild to update to png-1.2.4 from png-1.2.1, as
the new shared library will be fully backwards compatible with the
old. You can just reinstall the old packages (or update in place, by
moving png's +REQUIRED_BY out of the way, then replacing it, if you
don't make and save packages). Any *new* packages will depend on the
current version of "png". That's so, just in case their binaries do
use one of the new functions, you won't accidently run against the
old version, which would lead to coredumps. (There's no other way
to guarantee that. It's too much to expect every committer of every
package that depends on "png" to check carefully on subsequent
upgrades for the package using a new function in "png".) Packages that
haven't been updated for a couple of months can't possibly use the new
functions, so there's no benefit (and a slight downside in
compatibility of the resulting binary packages, if you make
binary packages) from rebuilding.

If you didn't update the last time "png"'s major version was bumped,
(i.e, you have a "png" older than png-1.2.1) then the above doesn't
apply to you.

If you've just updated to NetBSD 1.6* from 1.5* or older, you might
get some benefit from recompiling with gcc-2.95.3, but that's besides
the point.

Frederick