Sune Vuorela <nos...@vuorela.dk> wrote: > On 2013-12-06, Thorsten Glaser <t...@debian.org> wrote: >> Hm indeed. Makes me wonder whether it would not be better to make >> libtiff-dev the real package and abandon libtiffN-dev altogether. >> (Never understood why the -dev packages need the numbers, anyway.) > > The -dev packages needs numbers if you want to have several around at > the same time.
My original proposal to debian-release was to drop libtiff4-dev and libtiff5-dev completely and to change the name of libtiff5-dev to libtiff-dev, but this makes it too hard to actually do the transition because too many packages become FTBFS for too long. You can see my original suggestion and subsequent discussion in bug 717923. Sorry about the suggestion to build-depend on a versioned virtual package. When we changed what the package was being called, I forgot to update that in my notes of what I was going to say. Many months elapsed between the original discussion and the uploads, and I just forgot about that detail. I think it would be best for people to avoid versioned dependencies on libtiff*-dev. The only reason to do it might be as a hint to backporters that they can't backport to a version of debian that doesn't have a libtiff5-dev alternative available to it. I think it would be best to just change all the build dependencies to libtiff-dev, but package maintainers and/or backporters should probably know what to do in those relatively rare cases where tiff 4.x is required. Most of those cases are going to GIS and similar applications, some of which may be using libgeotiff anyway, since that's where BIGTIFF is especially needed. Other packages, like vips (which I also happen to maintain), will detect with ./configure whether a tiff 4.x is in use and will use new functionality if available but will fall back if not. So if someone backported vips and ended up using a tiff 3.x version, they'd get a working package without BIGTIFF support. Perhaps after the dust settles and tiff3 is gone, I can rename libtiff5-dev to libtiff-dev, but that would break packages with versioned dependencies on libtiff5-dev and not provide much more than aesthetic benefit, so I'm not sure that it's worth it. -- Jay Berkenbilt <q...@debian.org> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20131206101706.0942190878.qww314...@jberkenbilt-linux.appiancorp.com