On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 02:19:49PM -0800, Liav Asseraf wrote: > I'm not a debian user, but I have a question regarding > the 'testing' and 'unstable' branches. > Are the packages there dynamically linked against the > latest versions of other packages?
They're dynamically linked against whatever turns out to be required. This will not necessarily be equal to the versions installed on the maintainer's system, but they'll require something close to that, depending on when the libraries' ABI last changed. This is necessary due to the way library binary compatibility works. > Assuming vim (gvim) is dynamically linked against glibc and perl > (though it doesn't need their latest version), will apt-get must > download the newer versions of glibc and perl. Perhaps, depending on (a) whether the vim maintainer upgraded his build system to the latest version of glibc and (b) whether there was a change in glibc in the meantime that meant that applications linked against the newer version might not necessarily run against the older version. There's a difference between source compatibility and binary compatibility. > Obviously for applications (say gnome 2 when it is > released) requires newer libraries (gtk2) I understand > the neccessaty, but in the previous example (vim) the > downloading of the 20Mb+ files is not necessary. This is a fact of life in unstable, and it's better to guarantee correctness and freedom from random segfaults than to minimize download time. Sorry. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
