increase apt flexibility (for third party apps)

[Mike Hearn]

On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 14:47:51 +0200, MadMan2k wrote:
> Also you could look at the web as a huge tree with links being only
> permutations of the branches.

Well, the web is technically speaking a "graph" rather than a tree, but I
see where you're going.
 
> but the trade off is a more bloated system, since you will need to keep
> GCC3 and GCC4 libraries due to ABI incompability.

I think people are being distracted by the term "ABI" which is quite well
defined but is nowadays being used to talk about many different things.
Compilers changing things like name mangling or vtable layouts is quite
rare, in the greater scheme of things, and a lot of what people call "ABI"
instability is actually just plain old instability (or sometimes, people
not understanding how shared library versioning works).

> Bun generally you are right, this is not a black or white issue,
> therefore ABI compatibility should be considered as far as possible, but this should
> not slow down the development process - where breaking the ABI is necessary it
> should be done, since this is a advantage of GPL software and it should be kept.

You could equally say the same thing about API or semantics, but it still
would not hold - open source software does not get rewritten by magic
pixies whenever something somewhere else changes. For instance take a look
at the "njamd" memory debugger sometime. It no longer builds because it
relied upon the "__FUNCTION__ as string constant" extension throughout the
code. I attempted to update it, but hit other problems afterwards.

I mean, it's like Microsoft saying "we should consider source code
compatibility, but this should not slow down the development process,
where breaking source code is necessary it should be done since this is an
advantage of everybody shipping binary installers".

thanks -mike