Re: keeping distros and admins off of each other's toes

"D. J. Bernstein" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Paul Jarc writes:
>> But suppose instead that I want to make more intrusive modifications.
>
> That's a mistake. See http://cr.yp.to/compatibility.html.

The modifications I mentioned were bugfixes - "incompatibility" on
this scale happens anyway, between versions of the same package under
the same maintainer.  This change was made between qmail 1.02 and
1.03:
19980528 bug: qmail-smtpd skips first character in rcpthosts() call.
         tnx NND. impact: qmail-smtpd crashes on empty address; and it
         allows relaying to ""@any.host. fix: use addr.s.
Is this a compatibility problem?

Consider a different motivation, then: the current version of
/package/host/$DOMAIN/prog/skalibs may or may not be modified from the
stock version, but it is the one that I have audited and which I will
commercially support.  When I review a new version of prog/skalibs, I
make a new version of host/$DOMAIN/prog/skalibs available, but when
the user updates the distribution, I still should not mess with the
prog/skalibs current-version symlink if the user has chosen to deviate
from what I support.

Regardless, while I agree that compatibility is important, I don't
think it would help to try to use slashpackage as a means of
*enforcing* compatibility - ISTM more likely to limit adoption of
slashpackage than promote compatibility.


paul