[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#1130465: Bug#1134597: Please hint orthanc/1.12.11+dfsg-3 migration (force-badtest orthanc-wsi/3.3+dfsg-2)

[Sébastien Jodogne]

Dear Adrian,

> The proper solution would be:
> - rename liborthancframework1 to liborthancframework1.12.11, and
> - link with the shared library instead of the static library, and
> - make a library transition on every new orthanc version
> 
> With NEW processing being much faster now this should be feasible.

Thanks for these explanations.

Please could you kindly clarify: "With NEW processing being much faster 
now this should be feasible"?

I evidently understand that NEW would be the proper solution. However, 
my previous experience was that introducing a NEW package required an 
enormous amount of time, which is exactly why we decided to switch to a 
static library.

More specifically, contrarily to other C++ projects, the Orthanc 
Framework library is not designed to have a stable API, as it enables 
the sharing of code between the core Orthanc project and its plugins. It 
is really conceived as an "internal" library. For this reason, for each 
new release of Orthanc, a new "liborthancframeworkXX.YY.ZZ" package will 
have to be reviewed and accepted in the NEW queue. Originally, each 
Orthanc-related plugin conveyed its own copy of the Orthanc source code. 
But this approach was also rejected by Debian policy. The use of a 
static library seemed the most natural solution at that time.

Couldn't an alternative solution to NEW be to make the build of the 
plugins dependent on "src:orthanc" somehow? Indeed, the build 
infrastructure of each Orthanc plugins allows CMake to rebuild the 
Orthanc Framework from a path containing the Orthanc source code.

 > There are no dependencies encoded in static libraries, it has to be
 > ensured in a different way that when linking with
 > libOrthancFramework.a the correct libraries are linked - like
 > with depending on the exact boost version that was used as
 > suggested by Paul.

This is what I tried with the following changeset:

https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/orthanc/-/commit/43304015d951fc6701fe1329769943c10d3301c5

However, this led to another issue (see message 25 above):

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1134597#25

I'm lost here, and I really need help.

Kind Regards,
Sébastien-