On Jan 20, 2011, at 20:54, Jack Howarth wrote:

>   Is the current transition from png 1.2.x to 1.4.x the
> conventional approach that MacPorts uses to handle soversion bumps?

Yes, the current libpng 1.4 transition is representative of how library version 
number changes are handled in MacPorts. When a port changes its library version 
number, all ports that use that library need to be rebuilt. This is handled by 
increasing the revision of those ports. For a central library like libpng, this 
means many many ports receive a revision bump. It also means many ports get 
forgotten, because some ports haven't declared a dependency on libpng, usually 
because one of their other dependencies already does so. If you notice such a 
port that has not had its revision increased yet, please file a ticket so we 
can do so.


> I was shocked that the process doesn't allow legacy compatibility 
> package to allow older software to run rather than just leave the
> user wondering what exactly still works on his system. FYI, it breaks
> pymol for instance.


pymol and pymol-devel received a revision bump in r75159 at the time libpng was 
updated to 1.4, which should have alerted users, via "port outdated", that they 
need to rebuild those ports now. I just installed pymol, and it linked to 
libpng 1.4 with no trouble, so I don't believe there is an issue here. If you 
are seeing one, could you provide more details?


If we ever do find a package that absolutely requires libpng 1.2 and we cannot 
patch it to work with 1.4, we would introduce a new port libpng12 for the old 
version and make that port depend on it. But thus far it seems to have been 
easy to patch software to work with 1.4 so I don't anticipate that will be 
necessary.



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