Re: Building against old libraries

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 10:29:25AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>      
>      Anyone object in principle to dropping the gettext requirement
>      back to 0.16.1, or to temporarily dropping the GTK+ requirement
>      back to 2.8?  John, I think you probably have the strongest
>      feelings about this, so please let us know.  (I have not looked
>      at Ed's patch yet, so I'm not asking for comments on how he tried
>      to do these things, only on the proposal to do so somehow.)
>
> How about we do this:
>
> By default, the dependency requirements stay as they are.  But we add
> a switch to ./configure; let's call it --allow-old-deps which turns
> off, or relaxes the dependency checking.  And we add a Caveat Emptor
> entry to the release notes.
>
> This way, I think the necessary changes to configure.ac etc will be
> minimal, and a lot easier to maintain.

This sounds reasonable to me.

Ed, would this be enough to make you feel happy doing development
on Debian stable?
-- 
"There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you.
 And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you.
 I told them you were the best.  Now you damn well better be."
--Orson Scott Card, _Ender's Game_