[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] library updates

[From: Neal H. Walfield]

At Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:06:31 +0100,
Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> > how are updates of library packages which are not visible in the
> > application manager expected to work? We just noticed that when updating
> > gpe-calendar the updated libeventdb does not get installed. libeventdb
> > is visible because its section currently is "user/libs", so in this case
> > i can install the update but what if the package is not visible?
> 
> I think you just need to make sure that the main package includes
> appropriate version number in the dependency declaration, not just the
> library name; at least that seems to work for me.

That's a hack and a poor one at that.  Versioned dependencies are used
when the applications depends on a particular ABI version of a
library.  I think it is a bad idea to abuse this.

What florian wants is `apt-get upgrade' functionality, i.e. install
updates for any installed package.  The application manager could use
the following predicate to determine if an application is up to date:
if and application and all of its dependencies (direct and indirect)
are the latest version available (respecting APT::Default-Release and
the pin settings, of course), it is up to date.  This would cause a
bit of confusion when a new version of a commonly used library, e.g.,
GTK+, becomes available as then pretty much all applications
indirectly depend on it.  These can be exclude by having a base system
container.