Re: Better support for transition to guile-1.6

[Rob Browning]

Steve Tell <address@hidden> writes:

> Perhaps including an RPM .spec file in the distribution that builds things
> the preferred way go further than verbal arguments.  I've hacked up my own
> guile-1.4 RPMs; I'll see what I can come up with.

If they'd accept that, that would be great.

> I seem to recall reading that RH policy is that they avoid breaking
> binary compatibility across minor releases - so unless guile 1.4 or
> 1.6 can run programs compiled under guile-1.3.4, they're stuck with
> the old one until 8.0.

I'm not sure I understand.  If we're doing our homework, then you
should be able to install several versions of guile at the same time
with no problems.  Some apps will link against libguile6 and some
against libguile9.  I've been trying to make sure that's true in
Debian, at least, and I think we've been doing fairly well.

> Any reason not to make the numbers match up across the board, and have
> configure substitute all of them at once?

Alternately, we might want to consider versioning the guile-internal
lib directory.  i.e. put libsrfiX, etc. into /usr/lib/guile/1.6.1 for
example, and modify our internal LTDL_LIBRARY_PATH appropriately.

Since these libs aren't public, there may be no point to having them
in /usr/lib and dealing with the complexity of careful libtool
versioning.

Anyone?  I'd be happy to arrange for this immediately if we think it's
a better approach.

>> guile.  I regularly compile gnucash against guile 1.3.4, 1.4, and 1.5,
>
> (Good to know that we can study gnucash for version compatibility hints!)

I'm still trying to track down some problems, but it's getting better.

> Your suggestion for fixing the foo-config style scripts sounds plausible
> and worthy of discussion or trial implementation.
>
> I think its worth some effort so that multiple versions can coexist and
> "serious developers" can use their distributions's package system and not
> have to switch to a radicaly different setup from what "causual
> program-compilers" are likely to have.

Yep, maintaining a separate build/install tree for combinations of
guile, g-wrap, and guppi for building various test trees of gnucash is
somewhat a PITA :>

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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