Re: packaging the add-on libs...

[Greg Troxel]

Putting the guile version in the name makes sense to me, and I'd go so
far as to think about making libguile.a be libguile16.a.  Given how
many things link to guile 1.4 (e.g. gnomeish stuff), it seems critical
to make it easy for package systems to install both guile14 and
guile16, and that therefore these must have totally disjoint sets of
files, with the possible exception of the guile-config link to
guile16-config.  A nice guile.m4 to find the 'right' version might
also be an exception.

IIRC {Free,Net}BSD took this approach when packaging glib, so that
glib10 and glib12 could coexist.  Now, glib-2.0 (which is to glib 1.2
as guile 1.6 is to 1.4, more or less, I think) has a different name:
> l /usr/pkg/lib/libglib*
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  497840 Jun 20 15:27 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib-2.0.a
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel     774 Jun 20 15:27 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib-2.0.la
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      18 Jun 20 15:27 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib-2.0.so -> 
libglib-2.0.so.0.1
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      18 Jun 20 15:27 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 -> 
libglib-2.0.so.0.1
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  430869 Jun 20 15:27 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.1
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  183560 Nov 21  2001 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib.a
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel     733 Nov 21  2001 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib.la
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      16 Nov 21  2001 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib.so -> 
libglib.so.13.10
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      16 Nov 21  2001 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib.so.13 -> 
libglib.so.13.10
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  151468 Nov 21  2001 /usr/pkg/lib/libglib.so.13.10

It's kludgy for packagers to add this, and causes extra differences,
where if guile itself does it, it is just the way the world is and
will be the same everywhere.

On the other hand, putting all the dependent libs in
$(prefix)/libexec/guile/1.6/ also seems quite sensible to me, as long
as they are dlopened with an absolute path and no one is asked to put
this in LD_LIBRARY_PATH :-) Following the path of the P crowd seems
somewhat sensible, especially if there hasn't been large amounts of
pain from that approach.

But this still leaves the issue of libguile.a, which currently would
collide on my NetBSD system if I had 1.4 and 1.6 in the same prefix.
It is necessary to have both installed for compiling with, not just
running, since people need to be able to build programs from source
that link against older guile versions.

        Greg Troxel <address@hidden>