[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[Guilherme M. Nogueira]

The thing is:

1) Since arch is a rolling release, the package of a library is named
such as 'libpng' and not 'libpng-1.1' or 'libpng-1.2', as at any given time
only the latest package should exist in the system.

2) The files and symlinks are created during the package building
process and the package merely holds them. Because of that, when
there is an updated version of the package (may it be a library with an
so bump or any other), all the files and content of the previous version
are removed, and the content of the new one is installed.

3) In order to keep the old library, which are just the contents of a
package, when there's a so bump one could do any of:

a) Modify the library .install file to keep the old files
-> the files won't be tracked by pacman, which is something
NOT WANTED

b) Include the old files in the new package, making it trackable
by pacman
-> this creates an inconsistency as the package for version X
contains files of versions before X


Therefore, the solution to this is: if the user want to keep the
old version, he should either of:
- maintain a backup in place (bad bad bad)
- create a package with the previous files and install it with
pacman, making it trackable and removable when not needed
anymore


The bottomline: keep an eye on pacman's output, read the
mainpage news and decide what to do based on information.




-- 
Guilherme M. Nogueira
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- Arthur C. Clarke