On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Ian Stakenvicius <a...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On 06/11/13 12:56 PM, yac wrote: >> On Wed, 06 Nov 2013 16:48:54 +0100 Alexis Ballier >> <aball...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> >>> On Wed, 2013-11-06 at 10:15 -0500, Ian Stakenvicius wrote: >>>> However, it's been a long-standing general practise that if >>>> there are no deps in the tree older than what is necessary for >>>> a package, that package doesn't need to have a minimum version >>>> on the dependency atom. As such, issues similar to this are >>>> probably lying in wait all other the place in the tree. >>> >>> this is a common misconception: ebuilds must have min. deps >>> matching their requirements (exactly because of this problem) >>> >>> it can be fixed on the user side by 'emerge -uDN world' meanwhile >>> but this doesn't mean the ebuild doesn't have a bug, even if >>> minor >>> >>> Alexis. >> >> When I started contributing via sunrise, I've been adding the >> minimal versions of dependencies as declared by upstream but I met >> with very strict enforcement of the policy to not specify minimal >> version if all the ones in current tree satisfies. >> >> Is it documented somewhere or is it just unwritten consensus? >> >> What I see is only Ebuild Policy [1e] which doesn't deal with >> this. >> >> .. [1e] >> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=2&chap=1 >> >> > I searched as well, and couldn't find anything documented one way or > the other, either. I concluded that it's unwritten consensus. > > That's the main reason I wanted to start this discussion -- to > effectively start documenting it and get dev's all on the same page. > To be honest I think it should be policy or at least a written-down > guideline, that dev's should do this within reason -- if an > older-than-minimum version of something has been in the tree within > the past year. Gone for more than a year should be safe, I expect. >
I don't think a time limit is necessary here. If there is an identified incompatibility, we should update DEPEND. Note that I do not expect devs to go out of their way to test for the oldest supported version of a dependency; they just shouldn't close bugs as INVALID of someone else has done the work.
