Donovan Baarda wrote: > On Sat, Sep 29, 2001 at 11:17:19PM -0700, Neil Schemenauer wrote: > > Donovan Baarda wrote: > > If you change the major or minor version of Python installed then > > packages that depend on it must be upgraded. There is no way around > > that. > > Yes, but the old packages still work for the old version of Python. One of > the main reasons to continue running old versions of Python is because other > packages haven't been updated yet.
Try to think exactly how this would work. On the surface is seems like a good idea but I think it leads to a lot of complexity and more work in the end for the maintainers. Say I have a Python program "foo" that requires "python-bar". Let's say the installed version of Python is 2.0. So "python-bar" installs its modules into /usr/lib/python2.0. "foo" depends on "python-bar" and uses /usr/bin/python. What happens when /usr/bin/python becomes Python 2.1? Oops, it doesn't have the "python-bar" modules. Okay, how about we make "foo" use /usr/bin/python2.0. Now we upgrade to Python 2.1 and every works fine. Now we upgrade "python-bar" so that it installs in /usr/lib/python2.1. Oops, "foo" is broken again. I think it only solution is to have the version in the package name for all Python packages. Now instead of updating all the modules when a new version of Python is installed you have to update all the modules and the the programs that use Python as well. You've added a large amount of complexity to handle some easily repaired breakage that happens to the unstable version of Debian about once per year. I don't think that's a good tradeoff. Neil
