Re: packaging the add-on libs...

[Rob Browning]

address@hidden writes:

> At the risk of boring you all (or even of being flamed out of the
> list ;-) I'd like to repeat what has been (or is being) discussed
> in another thread. The Big Guys (those with the P in the name, you
> remember) have version-dependent [1] subdirectories where they
> stuff the modules into which `belong' to the interpreter [2]. This
> is a strategy also followed by Emacs. I think this approach might
> minimize the problems you expose above.

It's been stated that we're going to keep all the directly linkable
libs in the "normal place".  That means /usr/lib, and that would apply
to all the add-on libs so far (i.e. we don't have any non-directly C
linkable) add-on libs right now.

I guess you could argue for a versioned directory for any new shared
libs that aren't supposed to be directly linkable by any other apps or
libs.

> Of course, Marius is right in not wanting to introduce gratuitous
> dependencies and trying to distribute modules which are usable as
> either guile extensions or as shared libs on their own. But those
> shouldn't care about which guile version they are linked against (or
> even whether there is guile around at all), and I'd expect them to
> provide some (even if stripped down) functionality in any case.

These libraries *have* to care about which guile version they're
linked against.  For example, libguile-srfi-srfi-4-v-1 *has* to be
linked against libguile12 so it can use even primitive operations like
car and cdr.  And of course libguile12 depends intimately on the
particular source in ice-9/ that it comes with.  There's no such thing
as a stand-alone guile module/shared-lib.  If they don't depdend on
libguileX, they can't *do* anything -- no car, no cdr, no GC, etc.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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