Bug#982147: mgba: Please provide a libmgba-dev package

[Celelibi]

Le Sat, Feb 06, 2021 at 01:41:04PM -0800, Ryan Tandy a écrit :
> What is the software that would like to use this? Is it (or would it
> eventually be) in Debian?

The program I'm writing would be an IRC bot a-la twitch-plays-pokemon. I
don't think it would be a good candidate for inclusion in Debian as I
intend it to be a quick-and-dirty program for my specific needs.


> What is libmgba's ABI policy? Currently we use libmgba as a "private"
> library; only the frontends built from the same source link it, with tight
> version constraints. I guess shipping a -dev package would require making
> the library package public, and versioning it appropriately. It looks like
> libmgba's SONAME is derived from its version (i.e.  "libmgba.so.0.8") and
> does not reflect libtool-style versioning? Does mgba's author commit to ABI
> compatibility within the scope of a release branch?
> 
> (If it is attached to the release version that way, I'd have thought it's
> more conventional to name it e.g. "libmgba-0.8.so.0", but that's upstream's
> decision of course...)
> 
> In short, it's easy to ship some headers and a .so symlink, but I'm somewhat
> more hesitant about making libmgba into a public library, when it's not
> obvious to me that it's meant to be used that way, so I'd appreciate any
> links to where I can read about upstream's intent.

I have no idea of an ABI compatibility policy. I'm not sure there's one
right now.

However, the CMakeLists.txt already contains everything needed to
install headers. So I guess there's an intent toward this usage even if
the support (especially regarding ABI stability) isn't well thought out.
All I can say for sure right now is that the ABI will likely break with
version 0.9 because of a new field in the struct Table.

What exactly would be needed from the author of libmgba to make it
suitable as a public library? Would it be enough if they set a rule
saying that the minor version would be bumped at least on every ABI
break?

Best regards,
Celelibi