[clbuild-devel] postmodern: incompatible changes

[Victor Kryukov]

Hello list.

More on postmodern: today I've encountered a downside of clbuild
approach of "following latest and the greatest versions of libraries",
which I haven't expected before.

I've updated several libraries, including postmodern, using new lovely
"update --installed" option, and suddenly all my projects that are
using postmodern stopped working. It turned out[1] that Postmodern
introduced incompatible changes in the end-user interface, which was
pushed to its darcs repository. The old depository is still available
at [2].

That means that people who blindly update clbuild-managed libraries
and don't read the corresponding mailing lists would be hit by that
and similar changes. What do you think is the right strategy for
clbuild maintainers to respond:

a/ That's postmodern authors/users problem, clbuild is not involved,
or
b/ clbuild maintainers should have change postmodern download link to
the [2] in the transition period, or
c/ something else?

E.g. Debian would consider situation like that as a Debian bug, even
if package authors are to blame.

I'm wondering not because I cannot fix the problem myself (I can), or
expect clbuild developers to follow all included packages closely and
protect clbuild users from dangerous changes (it's completely
unrealistic), but because situations like that could happen in the
future, and clbuild should probably inform its users about such
possibility somewhere in the docs.

Regards,
Victor.


[1]
http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/postmodern-devel/2008-March/000198.html

[2] http://common-lisp.net/project/postmodern/darcs/postmodern-old 
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