On 2015-09-30 17:09, Oliver Eichler wrote: > does Debian really think it's stable or of any other benefit to stick > to > outdated libraries for about 3-4 years? And do I have to forget about > all new Qt features just because of that? Seriously..I will not.
It's clear that Debian stable is not a suitable choice for your needs, it does suit many other peoples needs. Not updating packages to new upstream releases in a Debian stable release is essential to its stable nature. New releases also introduce new bugs and compatibility issues. It takes time to properly integrate 20.000+ packages to work well together, changing a component in a working set after release undoes most of that integration work. Backports are a compromise to still make new upstream releases of some applications available to Debian stable users, but these don't benefit from the large QA infrastructure that continuously tests the packages in unstable. Leaf packages like qmapshack are good candidates for backports because they don't introduce new library versions incompatible with their predecessors. I therefore don't consider backporting GDAL, GEOS and other core libraries because that requires rebuilding all dependent applications and patching them to deal with incompatibilities. > It's not about that special line of code as it's function is not really > relevant. So if it is of help to you I can #ifdef it of course. But > sticking to outdated libs for years is beyond being reasonable or > conservative. And I doubt other projects limit their development to > Debian release cycles. So I will not swallow too many of those #ifdefs. Not willing to support Qt 5.3 is perfectly fine. It just puts it out of range for Debian stable users, and users of other distributions with a long support life like Ubuntu LTS, RHEL, etc. > Btw. On my SuSE system the official Qt version is 5.4.2 since a few > months. And I expect it to be updated to 5.5 with the next SuSE 42.1. > Imho a frequent update and development policy is what Linux is about. > If > I want to mess around with outdated APIs for an eternity I can use > Windows. From a developers POV this is very understandable, for many users the continues changes are actually a drawback. I continuously curse the Gentoo machine at work because it changes core components at unfortunate times making it unsuitable for production use. > See commit 68afe765a818fa5ece75955cfe646784dcfd8383. This should > restore > backward compatibility for now. Thanks for this change. But since you object to such compatibility changes for older dependency versions, it may be more appropriate to just consider QMS unsuitable for backports. I don't want to repeat this unpleasant conversation the next time the minimum required version of a dependency is bumped. You should not be restricted by Debian stable users for your development, they'll just need to wait for the next Debian stable release for QMS updates. Kind Regards, Bas ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Qlandkartegt-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/qlandkartegt-users
