Chris Cheney wrote: ... > for example libexif8 was removed by Christophe Barbe and replaced by > libexif9. Guess what that does... any package which depends on libexif8 ... > not be removed from the archive until no other packages still depend on > it.
Well, if it's uninstallable for a couple of days, does it matter that much? My guess is that while it would be nice to have other ways dealing with this, your suggestion would create a ton of problems for maintainers to have to follow too many old versions of their packages. In your particular case, the problem seems to be 'grep Package kdegraphics-3.1.3/debian/control | wc -l' generating large build-dependencies. (And yes, I know that this is a design decision by upstream.) Usually recompiling for soname-changes should not be that big a problem. I'd rather a slower development process than many packages depending on obsolete versions of libraries during shipping. Cheers T. P.S.: I was today hit by #199049 when wanting to reinstall my system, so I've been thinking about library packages 'disappearing' and recompiling of stuff today (or yesterday, really).
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