[lug] Music manager

[Nate Duehr]

Daniel Webb wrote:

> Speaking of source packages, one of my biggest pet peaves about Debian is that
> everything in unstable depends on the unstable libc, which makes mixed
> stable/unstable systems impossible.  Yet you can build source packages for
> most of them, and they nearly always work fine.  Is this just a "cover your
> ass" move by package maintainers or laziness?

libc6 changes are driven by the GCC developers (non-distro specific) and 
I'd guess that most Debian (or any other distro) package maintainers 
would file GCC major changes under the "pain in the ass" category vs. 
the "cover your ass" category, any day of the week.

All distros have to decide when to make the "jump" from one major 
version of GCC and/or glibc to another.  Stuff has to be compiled and 
tested on whatever version of the GCC tools they're going to release 
with that version of the distro.

Mostly though, as you've already noted, many times, well-written 
packages or source that doesn't use any of the features that are 
changing in the compiler itself, build and run "just fine" with newer 
versions of GCC... or in your case, on an older one.  For Debian, you 
can usually save yourself the time and effort of compiling yourself 
(although that's sometimes considered part of the fun of Unix -- 
compiling source and the attempt to make most source packages resilient 
as regards to compiler changes) by using packages from backports.org -- 
there's folks there who backport pretty much anything that can be 
backported to earlier versions of libraries, compiler, whatever changed 
between Debian releases.

Basically, the distro is what it is -- developers make a decision about 
when would be a good time in the version numbering life-cycle to switch 
compiler versions, library versions, etc... and they can't bother taking 
the time to compile and test against EVERY version, as that would be so 
time-consuming they would never get it truly "finished", but many times 
a source package from testing or unstable will build and run "fine" on 
stable.  You, however -- are the complete end-to-end quality control 
"manager" of that process, there's no one else "looking" at your 
resultant package or going to help you much if a mixed system starts 
failing in odd ways.

That's about all I can think of to say about all that fun stuff...

Nate