On 04/02/10 02:30, Greg Fitzgerald wrote:
if more packages want Parsec 2 then it's less disruption to split off parsec 3
Luckily, there is very little disruption to split off parsec 2.1 because there's no harm in leaving old packages as "parsec< 3".
I assert that there is harm. There will be duplicate packages installed (parsec-2.1 and parsec98-2.1) with identical code. Also, we would be committing to upload any bugfix/maintenance updates to both 'branches'. Do you wish to argue that this is an acceptable level of harm? (I would be easily susceptible to such an argument...) Or perhaps that we should arrange the transition differently than I guessed above? ((*Oh! another thought: distro packagers would probably still be unhappy to see anyone depending on "parsec" version 2 a.k.a. < 3, because they don't want to ship the same package-name at two different versions.))
On the other hand, if we forked Parsec 3 and called 2.1 version 4, then it would break any packages that depend on "parsec" or "parsec>= 3".
Those are dependencies which do not follow the Package Versioning Policy! Admittedly, it's impolite for an "upgrade" (3->4) to really be a downgrade, regardless. -Isaac