Re: Initial thoughts.

[Rob Browning]

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> writes:

> How about this. We have to change the library name anyway for
> different languages. Why not make each separate version of guile a
> different language? So you have libgwrap-guile-1.6 and
> libgwrap-guile-1.8 (I don't want to think about 1.4 :).

I'm still thinking about it -- this does at least paper over the
biggest issue (i.e. what soname/libname do you pick during a build).

> Or, or, or or or, you can go with not mangling the name and putting
> it in a versioned dir, and have the pkg-config file (still with a
> mangled name) pass -L directories as appropriate.

The problem with a versioned dir is that it requires -rpath, which is
something that's a source of big controversy and can cause a lot of
trouble considering local builds, inter-lib dependencies, and
dynamic-link'ing.

The careful lib naming approach is a lot less tricky, though also
uglier, and, in the limiting case, *really* ugly.  i.e. if you want to
be completely precise, you'd need libgwrap-guile-1.6-glib-1.2 :/

When I discussed this issue on debian-devel a while back, one of the
dominant stances was that dynamic libs are just kinda broken that way,
and that at least in debian, the approach was to just arrange the
packages so that during a version migration (i.e. guile 1.6 -> guile
1.8), dependencies will catch most of the problems and just break
builds until the newer versions propagate, and in the worst case,
unstable will just be broken for a while wrt guile, "but hey, it's
*unstable*".

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592  F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4