On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 12:46:07PM +0200, Björn Stenberg wrote: > Right, it does not force the latest, only the version that is > installed on the machine it runs on.
Not quite. The shlibs file just declares that a package which includes a program linking against, say, libfoo.so.0 should depend on a package called, say, libfoo0. The possibility to "version" that dependency exists and is actively used. A common example is when a library fixes a bug affecting its clients. A versioned dependency is added to make sure that the newly compiled packages can't be installed with the buggy versions of the library. That's just one example. There are only a few pathological cases where the shlibs file forces newly compiled packags to use the "lastest" release of the library package. > If whatever library versions are present at the time of building are > defined as the minimum requirements, doesn't that mean that packages > which are in stable today would not even be accepted into testing if > they were rebuilt? That could happen, yes. Some hours ago I uploaded a package which is for all _practical_ purposes an identical copy of the package in stable. It will probably remain stuck in unstable for a long while. Marcelo
