[Pkg-crosswire-devel] peaceful coexistence of libsword6 and libsword7

[Raphaël Pinson]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 6:19 PM, Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden at fastmail.fm>wrote:

> Raphaël Pinson wrote:
>
> > Just tried packages from your PPA. It seems libsword7 should conflict
> with
> > libsword6, since they both provide /usr/bin/imp2gbs .
>
> Yes, thanks for the reminder!  In their current state, they should.
>
> We've talked on the list a litle about putting the tools into a separate
> package say libsword-tools, or all into the diatheke package even -- but
> there's not consensus in the group on doing that at this point.  Your
> input would be appreciated, if you have an opinion and the time to join
> the discussion!


I think this is the safest approach : putting the tools apart from the
library. That said, it means you might have to put the API version in the
tools package name also, if you want to have two versions of libsword in the
repository at the same time.

Although this can be very useful, it will require much more work to
maintain, and it would probably be much easier to have a list of all
packages depending on sword and have them rebuilt each time there is an API
break. Also, this might require to rename libsword-dev into libswordN-dev,
if you want to be able to choose an API version to build a program in
particular.


My current (maybe naive?) thinking is that it would be helpful if, down
> the road, one could install libswordN and libswordN+1 (indeed, for
> libraries, I think this is much of why one embeds a SONAME version in
> the package name itself!).  But the older libswordN (for N <=6)
> packaging did not allow for this.


No, and most libraries in Debian/Ubuntu are like that. For a good example of
what you want to achieve, you can look into libmysqlclient, provided by the
mysql source package. While it makes the system less strict, it also makes
it more complicated. As an example, I often find myself making several
versions of PHP5 for the various versions of MySQL in our repository (at
work). There would have to be choices made on which version of sword to use
with each program compiled on top of it.  If there is no need for such a
thing, I don't really see the need for different versions of sword being
installable at the same time (e.g. if there is absolutely no API breakage
from one version to another, so that a program that builds on libswordN
always builds on libswordN+1).



> The libsword7 packages are definitely not ready for release yet; they do
> seem to work fine for me and for Dima on machines without libsword6, at
> least.  And my biblememorizer package sees them and uses them fine,
> which is good (previously I'd only tested with diatheke).
>

I've tried them with biblememorizer from your PPA, and it worked fine. I had
to remove libsword6



>
> How hard (and how worthwhile) is it likely to be to get things to the
> point where the different versions of libswordN will coexist?  Am I just
> making trouble for myself by attempting that?  Several other library
> packages do seem to manage it... so I'm not totally nuts to be thinking
> this way... am I?
>
> Jonathan
>
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