Re: packaging the add-on libs...

[Rob Browning]

address@hidden writes:

>> It's been stated that we're going to keep all the directly linkable
>> libs in the "normal place".
>
> Yes, I know (that's why I know I was taking risks ;-). I felt uneasy
> then and still feel uneasy abut it (see below).

Actually, one other thing I wanted to mention (and have already
mentioned to Marius).

Even though this library issue seems to me like a potentially serious
impediment to being able to upgrade from one version of guile to
another gracefully, especially if guile has a lot of add-on libs
provided by third parties, after talking to Bill, it seems that
although going with libguile12-foo-bar would be likely fix the problem
for guile, it still wouldn't address the same problem for all the
other non-guile libs on the system.  i.e. what about opengl, libc, X
etc.

So I'm wondering if perhaps I'm just coming to fully apprehend what is
in fact a common unix problem (when inter-library dependencies are
involved), one that people just don't think about very often, and one
that perhaps it's not guile's job to fix.

Not sure.  What do others think?

The problem is that if we don't do anything, there *will* likely be
trouble if we release guile-XY, with a new major version of libguile
and the system has some library or app blarg that depends on
libguile-someones-foo and libguile-someone-elses-bar.  If lib*foo gets
upgraded on the system before lib*bar does, then blarg will likely end
up being indirectly linked against 2 different major versions of
libguile until a new major version of lib*bar is released.

I was hoping we could avoid intermediate brokenness like that, but
perhaps we can't.  I guess in debian that would just mean another one
of those periods during a major interpreter migration where things are
very shaky.

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