Google Summer of Code 2009: Mentors needed!

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Mar 11, 2009, at 4:04 PM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> More to the point, there are already scenarios today (and far more  
> in FreeBSD's ports collection, where the efforts to address this  
> have taken on an increasingly desperate and hacky nature) where you  
> simply cannot have two desired ports installed at the same time due  
> to conflicting, mutually-exclusive dependencies.  Port Foo depends  
> on library Bar, version X.  Port Blah depends on library Bar,  
> version Y.  X and Y are incompatible with eachother, and Foo cannot  
> be easily ported to Bar-Y, just as Blah cannot be easily ported to  
> Bar-X (we're talking about some old software in many situations,  
> where there's just no one available to fix things "correctly" by  
> adapting to the latest revision of Bar).

or port foo could just statically link to version X of the library and  
port blah can statically (or dynamically) link to version Y. (the  
build process for port foo could even build the old version X lib).

> simply making sure that everything hooks into the depot location  
> rather than looking directly in ${prefix} seems a lot simpler.

I don't really want every version of every library on my system  
available for things to link to. Even if we somehow only track ABI  
changes, I still probably don't want every ABI version around.

Especially in cases where the older version is being kept around  
simply for compatibility with applications that no one is currently  
updating to 'new' libraries, I don't want to have to attempt to back- 
port any security fixes from the newer (and incompatible) versions of  
the library to the older one [and in some cases, it would probably be  
non-trivial to do so].

... but I've raised this issue before and haven't gotten a response,  
so perhaps I'm missing some reason why this isn't an issue?

> it also means that you can have multiple variants of a given port  
> installed at the same time, so all you're burning is some extra disk  
> space and CPU time in the interests of a more exact functional match.


And in case of shared libraries loosing 'shared' magic (since several  
programs could have their own version+variant installed because it  
matched more closely)

--
Daniel J. Luke
+========================================================+
| *---------------- dluke at geeklair.net ----------------* |
| *-------------- http://www.geeklair.net -------------* |
+========================================================+
|   Opinions expressed are mine and do not necessarily   |
|          reflect the opinions of my employer.          |
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