My 2 cents: Sven Moritz Hallberg (Sun, Jul 16, 2006 at 01:24:43AM +0200):
[...] She must specify it somehow. Two possibilities come to mind:
1. Add a field to the package description of foo (v1.4, say) that says "I'm backwards-compatible with 1.3." When building, this relation would have to be inspected to see whether any currently installed version of foo satisfies the dependency specified by the mount. 2. Declare a convention for version numbers to carry compatibility information, like the OpenGL standard, for example: If the new version is backwards-compatible, only the minor version number changes. If it isn't, the major version number must be incremented.
I prefer 1. The FSF use 2 for its GNU software and others started with it, too. But after a while most of them tend to increase major numbers. E.g. 3.0, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000 Regards, -- Stefan Karrmann If A equals success, then the formula is _A = _X + _Y + _Z. _X is work. _Y is play. _Z is keep your mouth shut. -- Albert Einstein