Re: Release now?

[Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>]

I'm all for shorter intervals between releases, but it would be good
to make sure that packages expecting 1.6 can work with 1.8 (modulo
insisting on a specific version when it isn't necessary, which is easy
to patch).  It sounds like this is indeed the case.

The 1.4->1.6 transition has been awkward - NetBSD pkgsrc now has a
'guile14' pkg installed in /usr/pkg/guile/1.4/ as well guile (1.6)
installed in /usr/pkg.  Unless one can say there is absolutely no good
reason for a program to need an older version, it has to be doable for
a package system to support both.  And supporting both means having
both fully installed so you can link against either - not just run old
binaries.  NetBSD seems to have achieved this with the dual-prefix
approach and the buildlink2 scheme (which tightly controls a pkg's
build environment).

IMHO, the dual-prefix approach points out that depending on
LD_LIBRARY_PATH is potentially troublesome.  This works out ok with -R
on NetBSD:

fnord gdt 35 ~ > ldd /usr/pkg/guile/1.4/bin/guile
/usr/pkg/guile/1.4/bin/guile:
         -lltdl.3 => /usr/pkg/lib/libltdl.so.3
         -lm.0 => /usr/lib/libm387.so.0
         -lm.0 => /usr/lib/libm.so.0
         -lguile.10 => /usr/pkg/guile/1.4/lib/libguile.so.10
         -lc.12 => /usr/lib/libc.so.12

fnord gdt 36 ~ > ldd /usr/pkg/bin/guile
/usr/pkg/bin/guile:
         -lcrypt.0 => /usr/lib/libcrypt.so.0
         -lm.0 => /usr/lib/libm387.so.0
         -lm.0 => /usr/lib/libm.so.0
         -lguile-ltdl.1 => /usr/pkg/lib/libguile-ltdl.so.1
         -lguile.15 => /usr/pkg/lib/libguile.so.15
         -lc.12 => /usr/lib/libc.so.12

And, given that the libguilereadline lib has different names, readline
works on both guile versions.  So, I consider this a success story -
thanks to ebayasi, wiz and mycroft for working on NetBSD guile pkgsrc.

All that said, I'm hoping that NetBSD and others can just update the
1.6 version of guile to 1.8, and not have to have 1.6 installed under
/usr/pkg/guile/1.6.  It's really cool that guile is starting to be
included in more pkgsrc builds (e.g. gnumeric), where it had
previously been avoided!

        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>


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