A flaw in the Daily Builds PPA concept

[Martin Pool]

On 10 February 2011 20:57, Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 08:58 +0000, Max Bowsher wrote:
>> On 10/02/11 08:40, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
>> > bOn Thu, 2011-02-10 at 08:17 +0000, Max Bowsher wrote:
>> >> I've just realized a flaw in the Daily Builds PPA conceptually...
>> >>
>> >> It tries daily builds of bzr core, and of plugins, into the same PPA.
>> >>
>> >> Once you do a daily build of bzr.dev, it's incompatible with the trunk
>> >> of most plugins. Oops.
>>
>> > In what way do you mean? We should deprecate APIs first if they're used
>> > by plugins, so a daily build of a newer revision of bzr.dev shouldn't be
>> > able to break plugins.
>> The breakage occurs for plugins that could probably work fine with
>> bzr.dev, but declare a strict API requirement otherwise. The strict API
>> requirement will usually be echoed in debian/control Build-Depends such
>> that the package never actually builds at all.
> The API requirements should no longer be strict - they should just cause
> warnings rather than be strict errors.
>
> If we hit package dependencies that are out of date we should fix them.

I agree.  I think we should generally make plugins only declare hard
dependencies against things that they know they are incompatible
against.  If there are things that are too strict, and there probably
are, we should update them.

I have <https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/704238> open asking
that the default api-versioning should just warn if an api
dependency's not met by default.  (Or perhaps it should at least
assume newer apis are probably ok.)

I think the PPA is reflecting reality and shouldn't be changed.

- m