Re: RFC: Bump default version for gtk+ to 2.18.3

[Martyn Welch <martyn.welch@gefanuc.com>]

Phil Blundell wrote:
> Automatically adding new versions with a negative DEFAULT_PREFERENCE
>  doesn't scale: if everybody did this then, eventually, we would end
>  up with virtually the whole tree being D_P -1. And it sends a
> confusing message to other users, since people tend to assume that a
> recipe with a negative D_P is broken or harmful in some way rather
> than merely untested or untrusted.  I would also propose that, in
> future, any setting of DEFAULT_PREFERENCE in a recipe must be
> accompanied by a comment explaining why it was set, and (if it is set
> negatively) under what conditions it can or should be removed.
>

I've recently had a small problem related to this. All of the kernel
packages seem to have DEFAULT_PREFERENCE=-1, for popular targets this
isn't a problem, but for less popular ones it was picking the latest
kernel at D_P=-1. Oddly this failed to build for "x86".

I'd suggest it would be sensible to remove all (or most)
"DEFAULT_PREFERENCE=-1" instances and only use
"DEFAULT_PREFERENCE-<target>=x" it to increase the preference for
specific targets, or leave it entirely up to the distributions.

Martyn


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