On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Ismael Valladolid Torres wrote: > El martes, 9 de septiembre de 2003, a las 14:27, Andreas Barth escribe: > > With a sid build environment you're always on the safe side. > > What about, having the choice of building against both the stable and > the unstable version of a library, choosing the stable version would > not make the path of the package into stable shorter?
Usually not, because autobuilders always use unstable when compiling your package for the other 10 architectures which are not i386. Additionally, you can't always make the choice: If you upload for unstable something which depends on libssl0.9.6, that would be a bug, because all newly uploaded packages should be linked against libssl0.9.7, so that a user is able to remove libssl0.9.6 after upgrading from woody to sarge (assuming no third party software installed, etc.). On the other hand, if you upload for unstable something which depends on libc6 >= 2.2 (because it was compiled under stable) and nothing else, it is certainly not a bug that you can use the package with libc6_2.3. I prefer compiling under stable when I can (i.e. when the libraries used by the package have not been declared deprecated in unstable) because that way I can point an i386 user to the latest version of a given package by giving the URL and he/she can install it immediately under stable without having to upgrade libc6. The ability to do this is a matter of luck, really. I consider myself lucky because I maintain several packages which do not need a Build-Depends field at all. What I would recommend here is that people enjoy their luck if they have it :-)