On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 12:54:35AM +0000, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > John Goerzen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >I think it has some problems, though -- for instance, differences in > >versions of libc. If we supported building packages from source better > >(which I really think we should), this instantly becomes more practical. > > As long as "the core" is stable, you shouldn't need to upgrade > it.
The core of Debian includes perl-base, which provides perlapi-(blah). It's quite common for newer applications with XS Perl bindings to start requiring newer versions of Perl (for instance, Subversion's Perl bindings require 5.8.0), and when you upgrade perl-base to a new minor upstream version you have to rebuild everything that has binary extensions, which includes e.g. bits of GNOME. It's not really all that easy to decouple this from a release of the rest of Debian and still have sane testing and release management, IMO; and then you're right back into having to release the whole thing at once. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
