MPFR in MacPorts

[Jack Howarth]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 04:43:27PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> 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.
> 

Exactly the point. MacPorts sorely needs the same sort of split-off
feature as fink where a libmpfr2-shlibs/libmpfr3-shlibs split-off
package could contain the required runtime shared libraries which
can co-exist but the main libmpfr2/libmpfr3 packages with the
development headers and shared lib symlinks would conflict. The
absence of such a capability in MacPorts is a major limitation
to proper package migrations. One simply can't expect to force
all packages in mass to migrate to new soversions of a support
library, Some backward compatibility support has to be retained
through co-existing shlibs split-off packages.

> 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).
> 
> -- 
> Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
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