[maemo-developers] Dependency problems after PR 1.2 update to extras builder

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Robin Burchell <viroteck at viroteck.net> writes:

> Things as I understand it:
> - Qt 4.5 on Maemo5 had no API/ABI compatibility guarentees.
> - Qt 4.6 took liberal advantage of that to change and fix some rather
> suboptimal parts.

This might have been handled better, though, with a proper soname change
etc.  There are ways to cleanly break an interface, still painful, but
at least sterile.


In general, I think it is not useful to release an SDK update earlier
than the OS.  The way they are joined at the hip, they need to be
released together.  (Yes, in an parallel universe, SDK and OS would be
more independent.  But they are not and we should not pretend they are.)

It is of course better to release earlier than later.  Thus, if we want
to release the SDK early, we simply need to release the OS with it, as a
beta.

But even if there is a SDK release with a corresponding OS beta release,
I'd say it should not be installed in the Extras autobuilder.  People
can try out the new SDK and OS beta by themselves, we don't need to
force them to use it.  The Extras autobuilder should build for the most
recent release of the OS.

(In my dreams, the OS updates would be developed in extras-devel as
well, end-users would eventually SSU from extras, and the SDK as such
would not exist.  We would still have the problem of how to make a
binary that is compiled against Qt 4.6 run with Qt 4.5, but everybody
except us has that figured out.)