Bug#743177: libvtk6 should conflicts with libvtk5.8

[Steve M. Robbins]

On March 31, 2014 10:58:28 AM Mathieu Malaterre wrote:
> Package: libvtk6
> 
> Clearly there is something missing here. libvtk6 can be co-installed
> with libvtk5.8. VTK API (ABI too) is completely incompatible in
> between those two versions.

Clearly I'm missing something, because it is routine to have different-SONAME 
versions of a library co-installable.  That is largely the point of having the 
SOVERSION in the package name.

 
> Typical scenarios that should not happen is an app linked against
> vtkCommon and vtkCommonCore. 

These have the SOVERSION correctly set in the library, don't they?  The 5.8 
libraries do 

steve at riemann{~}objdump -p /usr/lib/libvtkCommon.so.5.8.0|grep SON
  SONAME               libvtkCommon.so.5.8

and while I don't have 6.0 installed, the list of files shows the library names 
all end with ".so.6.0".

Any application will contain within it a list of the SONAMES required, so 
there is no confusion if both libvtkCommon.so.5.8 and libvtkCommon.so.6.0 are 
present on the system.


> This gets even worst with python
> 
> $ python
> import vtkCommon
> import vtkCommonCore

Well, this is a problem in that the python scripts don't or can't declare 
which version of VTK API they conform to.  I presume the trouble is that 
"import vtkCommon" brings in a different API on 5.8 v.s. 6.0.  If so, that is a 
still a problem even if the two packages conflict: I may write a script for the 
5.8 API, then upgrade to VTK 6 (removing VTK 5.8) and the script is broken.

-Steve
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