Re: Policies about shared libs (directly affects .deb packaging)

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>]

>>>>> "Rob" == Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> writes:

    Rob>   1) We may never change the major number of any lib during a stable
    Rob>      release cycle.

The one problem scenario would be a lib in the core distro that wanted
to change much faster than the rest.  In this case, could we unbundle
just that one library?  In other words, if we try out these
restrictions for a while and they don't work for some library, is
there a recovery path?

Otherwise, this seems fine.  I strongly support restricting what we
can change within a stable release.  (Partly because it's right for
developers/users, partly because I don't like parallel development and
there are lots of goodies in 1.7 that I want to see released :-)

Just to be sure, though, what are the changes that should cause us to
increment the major number of a library?

    Rob>   2) We must change the major number of *all* libs with every new
    Rob>      guile release, i.e. when we go from 1.6 to 1.8.

This seems self-evident.  If there's a library in the distro that is
so non-dependent on libguile that this would be burdensome, why is
that library in the core distro?

    Rob> No matter what we do, any time we change any .scm file, we have to
    Rob> make sure that it doesn't directly or indirectly alter the API of
    Rob> *any* lib inside guile in a way that requires that lib to change its
    Rob> major number.

What about scm_eval_string("(proc-whose-behaviour-just-changed)") ?

    Rob> If we don't want to promise to accommodate restrictions (1) and (2),
    Rob> then guile will have to be comprised of at least:

    Rob>   Package: guile-1.6
    Rob>   Package: libguile-12
    Rob>   Package: libqthreads-12
    Rob>   Package: libguile-ltdl-1
    Rob>   Package: libguilereadline-v-12
    Rob>   Package: libguile-srfi-srfi-4-v-1
    Rob>   Package: libguile-srfi-srfi-13-14-v-1
    Rob>   Package: guile-1.6-dev
    Rob>   Package: guile-1.6-doc

    Rob> During packaging I will have to be careful to split up the .scm files
    Rob> appropriately among the various lib packages, and we'll have to be
    Rob> very careful here upstream not to create inter-dependencies among the
    Rob> non-libguile .scm files that could cause problems across releases of
    Rob> different versions of a given lib.

This sounds a lot like hard work, and probably a worse nightmare than
having your proposed restrictions.

        Neil



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