MPFR in MacPorts

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2010-06-10 10:09:18 -0400, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
> We can easily make an mpfr3 port, which would result in the same functionality.
> 
> Naively, since the libraries have different versions in their names they ought not conflict.
> mpfr.0.dylib
> mpfr.1.dylib

But files like mpfr.h would conflict. This would be a problem for
someone who wants to upgrade to MPFR 3 development files, while
keeping the MPFR 2.x library. A solution would be the notion of
source port and generated port (what corresponds to binary packages).
Variants can more or less emulate that, but this is limited and
unpractical.

Note: MPFR 3 is mostly API compatible with MPFR 2, so that the
upgrade isn't much a problem for software that uses MPFR. The
case of the Math::MPFR Perl module is particular because it is
an interface (a couple of obsolete functions have been removed,
so that the Perl interface needs to be updated -- the removal
was announced a long time ago, so that the Perl module could
have had some test to anticipate the actual change, thus avoiding
the incompatibility, but this hadn't been done).

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Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)