[Slackbuilds-users] What packages do you upgrade?

[Niels Horn]

2011/6/16 Ozan Türkyılmaz <ozan.turkyilmaz at gmail.com>:
> 2011/6/16 Chris ABELA <chris.abela at maltats.com>:
>> 3. Upgrade them but do not bother with any other packages even if they were
>
> I got for that all the time.
>
> --
> Ozan, BSc, BEng

Well, if you upgrade a library, you might need to rebuild the packages
that depend on it.
This all depends on how big the change is in the lib - and how
upstream developers took care of that...

For instance, if you upgrade libxyz for 1.2.1 to 1.2.2 and upstream
maintained compatibility, everything will be OK.
But a change from 1.2.1 to 2.0.0 sounds like a major upgrade, with a
new version of the shared object and might intruduce compatibility
problems.

My personal experience:
- read the changelog of the upgrades package from upstream to find out
why they released the new version. If they are responsible persons,
the warn about possible impacts.
- run "ldd <your_program>" after the upgrade and check for errors
- test <your_program> - especially the functionality handled by libxyz
if possible.
- try at least to build <your_program> and see if it complains about
libxyz. If it does, you might even send an e-mail to <your_program>
developers telling them what you found out, or check their forum,
mailing list etc. There might be a patch in their source repo already.

This is all a lot of fun, but it takes some time. :)

--
Niels Horn