It's worth mentioning that the pain of such upgrades is considerably
reduced by the use of a package manager like GODI.  It's hardly
perfect, but it makes such things much easier.

y


On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 14:36:32 +0100, Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 03:02:39PM -0800, Jacques Garrigue wrote:
> > From: Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org>
> >
> > > On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 05:53:07PM +0100, Damien Doligez wrote:
> > > > Or you can wait a few weeks for 3.08.3.
> > >
> > > BTW, do 3.08.3 break binary compatibility with 3.08.2?
> > > (as happened when upgrading from 3.08.1 to 3.08.2)
> >
> > Any bug fix in the compiler has a very high probability of breaking
> > binary compatibility. This is due to the fact interface digests depend
> > on the indices of internal identifiers, so that purely internal
> > changes may break compatibility, eventhough the cmi format is left
> > unchanged.
> > It is reasonnable to assume that 3.08.3 will not be binary compatible.
> 
> Notice that this is really not nice for a bugfix release, since this means we
> have to rebuild all of the ocaml related packages on all arches, which may
> take us month and such. Maybe we would be better off just backporting the
> non-breaking fixes ? Maybe in future this situation could be somewhat improved ?
> 
> > By the way, due to a bug fix in the variance inference, it will also
> > not be 100% source compatible, but I hope this has no impact on
> > existing programs (as only few programs use variance). (I sincerely
> > hope there were no unsound programs around...)
> 
> Oh, well. ...
> 
> Friendly,
> 
> Sven Luther
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management:
> http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list
> Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>