Request for help: Distro releases and library version table

[Thomas Bushnell BSG]

Josh Sled <jsled at asynchronous.org> writes:

> That's fine... we can get the new release into the process for the
> future.  But I'm primarily talking about a gnucash release that can be
> compiled against existing systems, even if it's not an official package.

Are you volunteering to do that work?

> Yeah, it does.  Debian doesn't have any "slotting" capability?  There's
> no way to have two different versions of a library installed at the same
> time?  I can't believe that this hasn't already come up in other
> situations.  If nothing else, you can manually install the old versions
> in /opt/gnc-deps and point the gnucash build at them.

Good grief.  

Please, if you want any new gnucash in Debian, then you need to target
the new libraries.  Targeting old Debian libraries is a *losing
proposition*.  I don't know how many ways to explain it.

There are not going to be lots of Debian stable users who suddenly
want to run this.  Why?  Because I, the Debian maintainer, will tell
them that gnucash 1.8.10, which is in Debian stable, is the supported
Debian version.  I will not be building packages to track stable.  I'm
am busy on the *next* thing, not the *last* thing.

But if you produce something that cannot be built in Debian unstable,
then I'm just going to ignore it, and the result is that almost no
Debian users will use it.

Debian is *not* organized the way other distributions are, and you
don't seem to understand that.

> I want to get to a situation where we don't have to depend on old stuff
> because we're having frequent-enough smaller releases that people don't
> feel quite so compelled to upgrade when we *do* do a release, but
> instead are willing to wait until their distribution naturally upgrades.
> But we're really far from that right now, especially with the G1 -> G2
> transition.

Debian users who are using Debian stable have chosen *not to update at
all*.  Those users who want to upgrade are running Debian testing or
unstable.  

Thomas