[Pkg-javascript-devel] libv8 upstream branches and git-buildpackage

[Jérémy Lal]

Hi,
i drop a note here about how chromium and nodejs releases declare
their dependencies on libv8.
v8 development uses x.y branches for API-compatible changes.
The minor and patch level version numbers means backward-compatible
API changes, bug, security fixes. It is a c++ lib, so there is no
guarantee of ABI-compatibility even across patch-level versions,
and upstream is not looking at supporting this.

* chromium 6  : libv8 2.3
* chromium 9  : libv8 2.5
* chromium 10 : libv8 3.0

* nodejs 0.2  : libv8 2.3
* nodejs 0.4  : libv8 3.1

Today 2.2 and 2.5 branches are available in debian.

Chromium is usually not happy (bad face) without its proper libv8 version.
Until proven otherwise, nodejs is usually all right with more recent
versions of libv8 : that's why nodejs 0.2.6 depends on libv8 2.5.
Upstream nodejs team is following very closely libv8 releases, they
usually need it to be able to build nodejs cross-platforms (on cygwin, osx)

So unless nodejs tests don't pass i'm building version 0.4.0 against libv8
3.0, because that's the version chromium 10 expects tightly.


gbp layout in collab-maint/libv8
--------------------------------

* master, upstream
  current work on latest upstream libv8, meant to be uploaded to /experimental/
* 2.2/master, 2.2/upstream
  that's libv8 in squeeze
* 2.5/master, 2.5/upstream
  and in testing/unstable

I added debian/gbp.conf in each debian branch to make sure git-buildpackage is happy.

Cheers,
Jérémy.