libQGLViewer and Qt5

[Laurent Rineau]

Dear Debian maintainers of libQGLViewer,

I am the Fedora maintainer of libQGLViewer, and I would like to share ideas 
about ABI compatibility and about the Qt5 support of that package.

The upstream libQGLViewer already supports Qt5. The problem is that the 
upstream name of the library does not change when it is compiled with Qt4 or 
Qt5. That does not help the parallel installation of the two versions.


In the Fedora package, I plan to rename the Qt5 version to libQGLViewer-qt5. 
For example, the .so files will be (on x86_64):
  - for Qt4:
     /usr/lib64/libQGLViewer-qt4.so
  - for Qt5:
     /usr/lib64/libQGLViewer-qt5.so

I will also add a symbolic link /usr/lib64/libQGLViewer.so, that will points 
to the Qt4 version, for compatibility reason.

Do you have similar plans? If you do, I could try to suggest the upstream 
author to apply that new naming convention in the upstream version.


For the ABI compatibility, I have found out that the ABI of that library 
changes for each release. For that reason, I have decided to bump the SONAME 
of the library at each version: for example for version 2.5.3, the soname of 
the Qt4 version is "libQGLViewer.so.2.5.1", with the full version encoded in 
the SONAME. Do you have comments/suggestions about that?

Best regards,

Laurent Rineau

-- 
Laurent Rineau
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LaurentRineau