On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:24:30 +0200, AS (Andreas) wrote:
The difference is that the subpackages may need the new symbols immediately when installing the packages, whereas future builds of external packages would link with the latest library version that has been released before and is the one available in the build system's buildroot.
I don't understand. How is the contents of the buildroot relevant to "yum install foo"?
I think you do understand, but probably you just want to reinvent the wheel. Let's see:
No external package can build with new features of the new "foo-libs" package prior to making that package available in the buildroot.
If "foo" is the base package of "foo-libs", and this -libs package has added symbols needed by programs in package "foo", an older release of "foo-libs" would not suffice. On the contrary, all programs linked with an older foo library will continue to work.
For the corner-case that an update of a program in an arbitrary package strictly needs a specific minimum version of foo-libs, the packager may add an explicit dependency according to: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Explicit_Requires
You don't want to enforce explicit dependencies on library pkg NEVR in _all_ packages that use the library, do you?